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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. The cost of recycling something is probably mostly energy (i.e. carbon emissions) as is the cost of manufacturing a replacemement (even the materials cost itself is probably largely a function of energy spent to dig them up and get them to you) so if they pay you, it is saving carbon emissions and if not it isn't. You can get paid for dropping many metals off somewhere, you have to have your city pay to do anything with the plastic. I realize there are other factors but if one needs a quick guess that would be a good way.

If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine what one recycles.

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> If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant

Yeah... I'm not having an easy time with that one...

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/

https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1...

https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermed...

From the first link, it seems like the slightly to moderately higher cancer risks (correlational) of living near a dump are due to socio-economic factors (smoking).

Quotes:

A proximity analysis, which modeled how many cancer cases could be explained by distance to Fresh Kills, found that none of the five cancer types had elevated rates closer to Fresh Kills between 1995 and 2004, although it did find that some thyroid and bladder cancer rates were higher near the former landfill site between 2005 and 2015. But the researchers still saw little evidence of a link to the landfill because they could not find any reasonable explanations for how residents would have come into contact with materials in the landfill that were known or suspected to cause bladder or thyroid cancers, especially since Fresh Kills closed.

“More plausible” explanations, the authors wrote, were higher screening rates for thyroid cancer and Staten Islanders’ higher smoking rates. Smoking is a known risk factor for bladder cancer.

The link between landfills and cancers is kind of iffy. Some research shows higher rates of cancers, others don't. My guess is that it depends a lot on what's been buried and how. What seems more certain is that you can run into other health problems like heart/respiratory issues and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near even if there were no health issues.

> ...and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near...

For active landfills, yeah.

For decommissioned and capped-off landfills, nah, not if they've done it right. (And given that this is a regulated industry, it's very likely that they've done it right.)

In my experience in the American Southeast, Academy of Model Aeronautics airfields are often built on top of decommissioned landfills [0]... so I have spent a lot of time standing on and around these things. I've never noticed any odor, soft spots in the terrain [1] that is the cap, or any of most of the other weird things one might think of when one thinks "site of a former landfill".

[0] Why? Because the land is quite cheap, and a ~100 foot strip of tarmac, a few little structures (sun shelters and the like) and parking for a couple dozen cars isn't all that much weight.

[1] To be fair, the runway did have to be worked on every three, five years as the terrain under it settled. But bear in mind that we're talking about bumps in a runway for model aircraft, so the amount of settling was actually not very large.

Meh, none of this is at all convincing and I’d expect to see these things, based entirely on fear, even if landfills were completely benign.

But even if true, this is just making the argument that we should probably try to put them further away from people’s houses, which sure. I don’t want to live next to one even if there’s no risk at all so I agree.

> I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't.

I sort of am being paid to put my plastic in my recycling bin. My garbage company charges $47/quarter for a 35 gallon regular bin, and $22/quarter for a 64 gallon recycling bin.

It would require two regular bins to handle everything, which would be $94/quarter, which is more than the $69/quarter that one regular bin plus one recycling bin costs.

Unfortunately, how much you pay to recycle is hidden, in your taxes. You kinda need to know how much your cities pays for the recycling, vs trash, for each kind of material. Probably possible, but not easy. (But we know you can get paid for metals.)

In this case, it sounds like GP is using a private garbage collection service because their municipality does not provide garbage collection services (as is common in rural areas).

One would expect that the costs in that situation are likely to be more representative of the actual cost to dispose of the material, as the company can't obscure its economic reality with taxes.

Correct and funny enough because of this I recycle MUCh more living in a conservative rural area than a progressive urban area.

The private collection incentives me to separate as much recycling as I can and provides nice big free bins for this.

My city charges extra if I don’t recycle. But, I know from the data they publish that they are simply paying to recycle everything and the rate is higher than the rate at which they dispose of garbage. So I’m still paying for it, it is not paying me.

I think you’re right in general but in Australia and I think some other places as well we have a 10c refund on plastic bottles made out of PET (Also glass and aluminium) Most of our PET bottles, for stuff like soft drinks is now also made partially out of recycled plastic, many are made out of 100% recycled PET

If I understand correctly this is only economical because there is this whole system where all plastic soft drink bottles are made of PET, and so easily identifiable as PET and to get the refund you have to take it to a collection point where the only plastic entering the system are these bottles.

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