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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

We have separate trash, recycling, and compost bins. Our city hands out free compost from the facility that handles the compost bins. I would never spread that compost on my property or eat anything grown from it. I mean, have you seen how terrible people are at sorting trash? Who knows what atrocities have happened in that composting facility!

My own wife dumps non-compostable stuff in the compost all the time, is annoyed at me when I point it out, and then somehow doesn't think twice about taking the free compost for gardening.

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Don't worry, industrial farms buy that compost for cheap, and you then buy their food in stores.

Wait until you hear about the nanoplastics found in rainwater

This may seem ignorant or cynical, but my baseline assumption is the contents of all bins end up in the same landfill. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that your garden/organics/green bin actually goes somewhere other than straight to landfill. Although it's entirely possible that the capital and labour required to make it into compost and give it away for free cost more than handing out vouchers to citizens to buy compost on the free market. An analogous false economy happened in my city with a 24-hour/day train trial; when they did the math it turned out it would have been cheaper to give every single passenger an uber to their destination.

In my city (a suburb of LA), the trash contractor says they don’t have separate bins because they “separate recycling at the facility”. What a joke! As if they’ve got someone going through your trash like a raccoon, picking out the bottles.

I get that the plastics industry has an interest in making recycling appear seamless and efficient, but what a crock.

You can buy hardware which does a lot of the sorting†, and you can pay minimum wage for people to pick harder-to-identify elements out of what's left. There really are plenty of sites doing that.

† The very easiest is steel which you just sort with magnets, but aluminium is more valuable and it's not that hard for machines to sort it, paper/ board can often be machine sorted too.

There's definitely sorting going on (including hardware, such as magnet, utilizing gravity/shaking, chemical) but still plastic often ends up in landfill because it's not profitable. Even China who used to do "hire minimum wage workers" to do recycling but at global scale ended it because all the adverse health/environmental effect making it worse than not profitable [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/KXRtNwUju5g?si=VlmZAcdhZM0_IyiE

Thanks for sharing. Just watched the whole thing. Incredibly revealing (/confirming).

The ugly truth is that most plastics aren't really recyclable, especially not in the form of "big glob of mixed mystery-polymers with a dash of food residue and other organics". What usually happens is it's either downcycled into a significantly lower-grade material, or depolymerized and turned into fuel.

PET recycling is the one exception, where you can relatively reliably get reasonable (but lower) quality plastics back out of the process.

You're on hn and don't find it plausible there could exist a machine that sorts recyclables??

I'm picturing a giant box with raccoons strapped to ropes on pulleys, conveyor belts, a steam engine.

The "compost takes care of it" crowd is mind-boggling to me.

Interested in health to avoid an entire societal ecosystem, but not enough to test their own soil, even once.

Same as the "commingled recycling takes care of it" crowd.

> "compost takes care of it" crowd

Can you explain more? I'm not familiar with this crowd. Takes care of what?

Someone puts stuff into compost that won't break down and is toxic.

Then you use it for soil and eat it

So what ecosystem is that crowd avoiding?

Vegetables at a store or farmer's market, seemingly.

Perhaps your interpretation is right, but that would mean there's some group of people who simultaneously says "I know people put toxic chemicals into this industrial compost I use but I'm totally fine with that" and also "I only eat vegetables I grow myself". I highly doubt any such person exists.

I wouldnt know.

The take is that the microorganisms in compost somehow digest the dangerous chemicals and make them harmless...

The PFAS content from “compostable” food containers alone makes me cringe at the notion of city compost being used as fertilizer for crops.

My understanding is that commercial composting process is much more aggressive than what’s done for home composing

As much as ~88% of tested kale contained PFAS, and it's because of commercial compost. Organic kale has more PFAS than non-organic because it uses more compost rather than more synthetic fertilizer.

https://anh-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/230621-ANH-US...

A little background on that source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Natural_Health

That puts it into perspective indeed.. Thanks.

80 nanograms per kg. That’s 80 parts per trillion.

And eating a kilogram of kale is no mean feat.

Maybe all at once, but it isn't like the PFAS is going anywhere. It'll wait for you to eat more and more over the years.

And how much to turn your testicles inside out? Spoiler, nobody knows.

Does it eliminate heavy metals? PFAS? Every type of plastic? Literally every other type of contaminant that I haven't thought of? Is every batch of the end product tested thoroughly? Even if contamination is rare, is it as rare as other sources of garden soil? Why would I chance it when I know the source is dirty?

Also how do you even test something like compost properly? It is not that uniform product, so test samples could be fine, but other parts metres away could have high levels of contaminants...

Like, aggressive to the point of being nuclear? Because if not, I'm not sure how you expect it to remove a lot of the chemicals mentioned...

I can buy a 'quality' 25l bag of earth for $14 (Switzerland) and still be sure to find visible plastic parts in it. The earth the farmers buy here locally is rainbow colored if you look closely enough.

I introduced the majority of plastic in my garden trough expensive earth & compost.

I only use Coco at this point (what is crazy considering there are no coconuts where I live)

Shit, is that really what the coloured bits are? There was me thinking it was some kind of fancy beneficial additive.

It's mind blowing to read this here, thinking it's somehow just me buying always the wrong stuff.

But welcome to our reality where we complained about micro plastics so long without doing something that you cannot actually buy earth/compost without macro plastic anymore.

If you’re referring to the shiny pieces in soil you buy from a garden shop, that’s actually perlite - a natural volcanic glass that’s added to improve soil drainage.

I don't think so, it's smaller multicoloured specks. All sorts of interesting colours.

It's not perlite. It's colorful plastic and also smells like that when burned.

I was under the impression that "compost" was used for biogas and not as fertilizer? Is that not the case?

Using it for food sounds like a bad idea.

They've been applying sewage sludge to fields for years with the EPA's blessing:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-12/documents/ep...

All kinds of shit goes into the storm water drains, including a bunch of Teflon's relatives.

On the rare occasions that they test a field for PFAS, it often comes up positive. I think it's just "don't ask, don't tell" at this point.

(Edit: Ok, maybe it's "only" 5% of farmland: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/04/ewg-forever-c... )

I mean, maybe I shouldn't be that hard on them -- you do need to reuse human and animal waste if you want to be sustainable, and this is a plausible way to do that, and they weren't thinking about PFAS at the time (only PCBs are mentioned in that document) -- but it should be obvious now that the current sewage system is not compatible with this use case. Too many nasty things can get into it. Which does create a problem -- if you don't apply the sludge, then what do you do with it? It's like we need a whole separate system for only organic waste. Or we have to stop selling to the public -- or to industry -- any compound we're not willing to eat.

Sewage sludge had also happily been mixed into animal feed.. So that's that.

Wait till you find out that plastic is an approved material to feed the animals that are slaughtered for you to eat.

It legal to have a certain limit of plastic in it.

But does it matter? Food touches plastic throughout the preparation phase. Most factories have plentiful plastic components. Workers have plastic gloves. Then the final product is wrapped in plastic.

Removing it from feed wouldn’t do much in terms of exposure.

In the United states

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