Tonga is running out of space for more than 30k abandoned cars | Hacker News Reader

Tonga is running out of space for more than 30k abandoned cars

abc.net.au

55 pointsadrian_mrd74 comments

I hadn't realised just how small Tonga's land area is. Imagine a square 30km x 30km. It's smaller than that (747 square km).

But this table of countries ranked by population densities shows Tonga is not even close to the most densely populated countries (Tonga is about 65th of about 200 countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

It’s strange how bikes haven’t caught on. Similar to Malta, which is tiny and heavily urbanized, but has a massive car problem. 30 km is what some people commute on bike daily.

When I was living in America, I'd drive 300m to the grocery store because I could, so I understand the feeling. I'm also sure it's hot & humid much of the time, which makes walking & biking a sweaty affair.

So you need a 3 ton machine to avoid sweating?

Shades and trees are cheap to install and maintain, not to mention the wind whilst riding which gives you a nice cooling effect.

The only reason you do not have shading+trees around roads is because they are removed in name of "traffic flow".

Have you ever tried to carry an air conditioner? When you include the power source, it’s really heavy. Do you think someone who drives 300m is capable of carrying that kind of weight? I suppose I could carry a car door and just roll down the window.

To be fair (and balanced) Tonga does have a hot and humid (tropical rainforest) climate. The "cold" season means "it rarely gets over 27C (80F)", and humidity only dips a bit below 75% during the "dry" season.

Fair enough, but the solution cannot be cars. Its simple geometry. Cars do not scale in cities and small spaces. Enough brainstorming would give a cycle-friendly non-car solution to this. I don't know: sprinklers + shading + narrow streets (shading) etc. Car-centric cities only make cities hotter if anything.

Oh I completely agree, I’m sure there are a number of issues (salt, natural disasters, wealth) but it seems insane that a sunny, windy, tropical island 30 miles long would be reliant on ICE cars for anything but maybe emergency. I feel like that’s a complete personal and systemic failure.

That's not why, it's so that business signage is not blocked by foliage, and so that police can scan areas more quickly while on patrol.

That's an impressive level of carbrain. Roadside trees is completely standard all over the world, and Nukuʻalofa certainly has them: https://www.google.fr/maps/@-21.1406571,-175.2050866,3a,75y,...

> it's so that business signage is not blocked by foliage

That's patent nonsense (https://www.google.fr/maps/@52.3653572,4.8753188,3a,75y,95.4...) but even if it were not, why would it matter? Making the environment at large better should be the foremost guiding principle, businesses can adapt their signage habits.

> and so that police can scan areas more quickly while on patrol.

If roadside trees prevent your police from doing their job, you really need better police. Then again, we know the US needs better police.

My comment was more about the interest groups that wield disproportionate decision making power at local levels. But have at it if you must.

>When I was living in America, I'd drive 300m to the grocery store because I could, so I understand the feeling.

One of the best things about getting rid of my car was it took those opportunities away from me. No matter how lazy I feel I can't take the easy option.

I walked a lot more in San Francisco, which is a very walkable city in most places. Just keep an eye out for poop.

Ah yes, the open defecation capital of North America.

Is a search for "sidewalk poop" mentioning SF in the top #1 search result for you, too?

https://www.google.com/search?q=sidewalk+poop

Same thought. The other commenter posted the largest island is roughly 100 sq mi. This could easily be serviced with bikes, scooters/mopeds, or cheap sidecar motorbike taxis like they use in other countries.

Malta is hot, and hilly.

> I hadn't realised just how small Tonga's land area is. Imagine a square 30km x 30km. It's smaller than that (747 square km).

And that’s for the entire archipelago, the biggest island, Tongatapu, is 260 sq km with a density of 274.

this isn't that big of a deal. People do this on purpose. Collect cars, wait until the price of steel goes up, and bring in a moble crusher and truck them out to a port. It's pretty common practice. If you play your cards right, you can make money. It's only 8 acres. I've seen 40+ acres full of cars, which were crushed in a few days with a special machine.

Is it not economically viable to melt the cars for steel? Or is there not enough demand for steel in Tonga that the steel would need to be shipped abroad anyways?

Islands with a total population of 100k. Lack of demand and probably no machinery to melt and process steel, expensive electricity/power to do that kind of processing, lack of other inputs, and a population without the expertise. Given how remote and small it is it's probably not economic to do anything about the problem.

No harbor to ship it?

This is why they had to get subsidies from Japan to ship the cars back out. There's demand for cars, but now "someone" needs to deal with the broken ones at end of life. "Someone" has to eat the negative externality of shipping the dead cars off-island.

Seems odd they don't use the same incoming ship to take cars back

Surely they don't have enough cars to return every time a shipment of new cars comes in. If that was economical, would the abandoned cars have piled up in the first place?

Assume they could at least do the 30,000 car backlog

assuming the population isn't growing rapidly, they should. Every car imported should turn into a broken car in between 10 and 30 years so as long as the number of cars has been relatively stable you'd expect roughly 1 car in for 1 car out.

Probably costs a lot to ship scrap metal out of there. Scrap goes from the US to China cheaply because the boats would be going back empty otherwise.

What else does Tonga export in such quantities?

Food, apparently.

The main island of Tonga is 100 mi² with 75k people on it. It's an island that's basically an accumulated coral reef; there's no natural resources you can get from mining it. And it's 2000 miles from the nearest continental landmass.

There is no heavy industry on the island, and the economy isn't really capable of supporting heavy industry.

In Bangladesh there's a huge appetite for steel because the country lacks meaningful iron deposits. That's a big reason the have a huge ship dismantling industry, and I presume some way to process the steel. But Bangladesh has a population of ~170 million, and Tonga's population is around ~110 thousand. I wonder what the minimum viable population is for supporting scrap metal recycling.

How ship-breaking helped shape the steel industry -- https://www.tbsnews.net/supplement/how-ship-breaking-helped-...

It's an island chain of 100,000 people, so no. Plus, electricity is extremely expensive, importing the fuel to melt down steel would be crazy.

> Plus, electricity is extremely expensive

I was wondering how much, and, wow:

> The December 2022 review indicated that the electricity tariff would decrease from $1.19 per kWh to $1.01 per kWh, effective from the 1st of January 2023.

-- http://www.finance.gov.to/node/601

California is only half the price of that :/

Huh, did not know California has higher prices than what I pay in Germany (0.4€ / $0.43)

As if it's trivial to process steel.

They should crush and press them into a small box size, :)

These people have lived sustainably for hundreds of years. Clearly, our "modern society" is inferior.

With a fairly low life expectancy, unfortunately. How can we live 70+ years while living sustainably? I'm sure we can do it, but we haven't sorted that out yet, maybe the long-living Mediterranean communities will offer a clue.

It's being studied

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone

Good point. We need to keep the good stuff and get rid of the single use plastics and other aberrations that put profits over sustainability.

Maybe unpopular opinion:

Sort it, burn what you can for electricity, dump rest into deep ocean.

This is actually the popular opinion, world wide. It's what we've been doing for decades. And it's terrible.

The really unpopular opinion is "let's generate less trash and reuse everything we can, plus slap a recycling tax on everything".

It is but on the scale of this island it's a drop in the ocean ;)

All the car wrecks combined would be like one sunk ship.

What is the difference between recycling taxes and regular ones?

I would envision it as a money that don't go to the general pile of tax-raised money which becomes the country's government budget, but be kept separate and be used for investments in recycling and environemtn protection. I am not a lawyer and have no idea if this is a thing anywhere, but it seems so logical. You raise money off an ecological problem and use them, directly, to solve the ecological problem (and others).

> the country's government budget

It just will not work, countries are not interested in keeping the planet clean from plastic and from greenhouse gas. It must be on international level.

This is challenging to answer with the nonspecific, "regular ones?"

What, to you, is a "regular tax?"

Payroll taxes? Income taxes? Property taxes? Sales taxes? Carbon taxes? Gas taxes? Cigarette taxes?

All are as dissimilar to recycling taxes as they are to each other.

They mean direct taxes, as opposed to indirect ones.

Why is it terrible? The OP said to burn what you can for electricity, so that really should just leave metals. Copper is valuable, so hopefully they'd strip all the wiring and recycle it, leaving just steel and maybe aluminum (which itself is valuable for recycling too). How is dumping steel car frames in the ocean "terrible"? These days, entire ships are sunk (after getting all the fluids out of them) to actually help the ocean wildlife as artificial reefs.

However, I do agree there should be a lot more effort to recycle this stuff.

Burning plastic/paper/other packaging gets you a lot of toxic stuff in the atmosphere. I know there are filters and processes and whatnot, but it just feels wrong and smelly.

Aluminium recycling actually works great, recycled aluminium is 95% less energy expensive and some 75% of aluminium comes from recycling. (1)

Steel could also be recycled like that, I guess ships are a lot more difficult to cut apart and melt down than cars, because they are heavier and larger (citation needed). At any rate, we put a lot of resources and energy into the steel for cars, maybe we should use that steel as much as possible instead of putting more energy into more steel.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling

I see now. I misunderstood: I thought you were saying that dumping the remaining steel shells in the ocean was terrible for the ocean. Yeah, burning all that stuff is terrible.

I meant it in a more systemic way. Getting rid of waste is always worse then reducing ir reusing.

>after getting all the fluids out of them

Stripping the toxic elements out of a car isn't trivial, especially so in a place as poor as Tonga.

Same solution as most problems: import tax should include cost of getting rid of the car when you’re done. Then getting rid of a car is free. Ship it off the island at your expense and you get a refund.

Yes, came for the same comment. Add an import tax of 2x whatever it takes to ship a car out. Each new car that comes in, two cars go out.

Isn't this the Mount Everest trash solution as well? You have to carry out more trash than you carried in

some call it decency to leave a place just a little bit better than the way they found it, but "Mount Everest trash solution" sounds nice too

If we trusted decency, we wouldn't have the Mount Everest trash problem in the first place...

Decency in short supply.

Everyone has to carry out a fair bit more to break even, including the 4-5 poor buggers who die on Mt. Everest every year (and all their trash).

This has the same issue as the proposed ‘no older than 15 years’ rule. It costs money.

It’s hard to get past how cheap it is to just dump a car and buy a 20 year old one. Externalise those costs, what could go wrong?

>It costs money.

One of the benefits of not having a local car industry is you can tax the hell out of cars without much protest.

It's a nice idea, but as the article states:

>Located between Hawaii and New Zealand, over 3,000km east of Brisbane, Tonga's archipelago of islands is an expensive place to send a car.

>Once a vehicle gets here, it's used for a long time.

So basically you're making cars even more expensive, which will be an unpopular move with the locals, I assume.

I wonder if it would be possible to use old cars and other trash to reclaim land from the ocean?

So many of the problems we've made seem like they could be great fixed by less people instead of more each year.

Imagine the next population doubling and all that cost and suffering it will bring.

Damn all those people living their own lives and doing what fulfills them instead of what you want!

The population won't double again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...

The problem is too many cars, not too many people.

The truth is somewhere in between, as those people don't want to live the "idyllic" Pacific islanders life anymore, they instead want the same ease in transportation as people in the West have got accustomed with decades ago (i.e. cars). And who can blame them?

Technological progress have really doomed the planet. People living in huts and foraging for food are CO2 neutral. Meanwwhile nowadays utopia is a huge house, huge fridge, huge TV, gaming PC, tablet, phone, great exotic food, jetting to vacations. And of course everybody(*) planet-wide wants that, but there's just not enough resources/CO2 budget of the plante to cater for that...

(*) it's a generalization, yes people are different and not 100% of humans want this, please don't be boring and nitpick this word.

The cure is worse than the disease in that case.

And to think that the neo-malthusian discourse was derided just a few years ago. I'd say that in the last two years or so it has established itself as fact, even though nobody calls it out loud by name (probably because of past negative associations).

Since the problem is proportional a function of population and car importation, you would need to depopulate 100% to ‘fix’ it, anything less just slows it in proportion.

It’s the same as advocating mass suicide to reduce pollution. Absurd.

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