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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I dont understand why something that's recycled, renewable and sustainable can cost more than something that's not.

The price is a proxy for materials and energy required to produce the product. You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive. The sustainability part is one of the most powerful signals captured by price.

So when someone is trying to sell me something that costs more but is somehow more sustainable, I immediately call bs.

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> You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive

We're not running out of oil, that's why the market forces you refer to aren't raising the price. This is why almost all mainstream economists call for a carbon price.

Well, we have reached peak oil, so we're slowly edging towards the threshold at which extracting oil will consume more oil than it produces.

Economists are calling for a carbon price because by the time we reach this threshold, it will be way too late for both climate and oil.

This. The problem with fossil fuels right now is not that they are bounded, but that extracting them is polluting the atmosphere and driving climate change. While we've certainly exhausted some of the more easily accessible oil, coal, and natural gas deposits, we've gotten really good at finding more. Production is only scaling down because investment is, not because we've run out of oil to drill for.

> we have reached peak oil, so we're slowly edging towards the threshold at which extracting oil will consume more oil than it produces.

How does that follow?

Because, if my memory serves, that's the definition of peak oil.

Peak oil is the peak of the curve `energy extracted/energy expended to extract it`. Since 2017, this has been decreasing.

*edit* I realize that the definition of peak oil I've been using (which I believe I've found in the writings of Jancovici) is apparently not the standard definition. My bad.

I feel one thing that few bother to understand is that it would be extremely hard to arrive at "no more oil", even if humanity somehow made a good faith effort to get there. There is oil all over the place on earth. It's not necessarily oil that's economical to extract, even by today's XXX (pick your term) corporations. There is also energy all over the place (again that might not be economical or politically correct to extract right now.) The result of this is that if NNN years in the future you need oil for some worthy reason (say, you need more Legos :-), you can collect and spend the energy and get the oil. That's not an issue.

Because as oil reserves are depleted, oil is extracted from more and more difficult places. Deeper wells, less porous rock, etc. these new sources require more energy to extract the same amount of oil.

More ENERGY needed. Which doesn't have to be oil. Oil is extracted by businesses which pay attention to their bottom line - and so would not, could not, will not use significant amounts of oil to extract comparable oil. Even as you consider current truck mounted prospecting, gas or generator powered drilling, crew vehicles, refineries, all the way to supertankers - these exist BECAUSE the ratio of usage to production is extremely favorable - and not through some fatality. Causality goes the other way: a worsening ratio necessarily causes a switch to other methods.

> More ENERGY needed. Which doesn't have to be oil.

Fair enough, I was using oil as the unit of energy.

> we have reached peak oil

That's just not true. If it were, oil production would decrease every year from the current year onward. It's actually been increasing, and given recent discoveries of large unconventional reserves in the US and elsewhere, we can keep on increasing oil production every year for a long time.

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...

> extracting oil will consume more oil than it produces.

Huh?

1) EROEI is still strongly positive in fossil fuel extraction, and 2) even if it weren't, we'd still extract fossil fuels.

Given the utility of petroleum as a chemical feedstock and energy-dense fuel for aviation, we're going to keep extracting the stuff long after it becomes EROEI-negative. It makes perfect sense to spend 1.2 units of nuclear/solar/etc. energy to extract 1.0 units of oil energy if that oil energy meets a need that nuclear/solar/etc. can't satisfy.

You can't make legos out of uranium.

Isn't it already more expensive to extract oil than it was, say, 30 years ago?

Obviously this is not a perfect proxy, but I remember in the late 90s, gas at this specific gas station near my high school was 92¢/gal. Inflation should bring that up to under $2/gal today, but the average gas price in the US is considerably higher.

(I guess back then the US wasn't exporting oil as we are now, which could account for the difference.)

This is because of a very basic economic concept called "externalities": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Very simply: Not all costs are included in the production costs of a good or service, they are external. For example, the producer usually does not pay the full cost of emitting CO2 when producing something. The remaining cost of born by the public, in the form of environmental damage, health issues, and so on. There are many other externalities, like social (e.g. by exploiting workers, you can produce something cheaper).

Because it costs energy and effort to collect damaged plastic and turn it into new plastic. More than it costs to just use some oil to do it.

Curious if that means putting more CO2 in the atmosphere than if we tossed the old plastic in a landfill and refined oil instead.

That's the fallacy of many of these bio-things, more emissions. Keeping consumption habits and dampening our guilt with green washing is not the solution. The keyword is: less.

Lego promote the idea of less too. They make durable products and through Lego Replay they will find a good home for your unwanted Lego bricks.

The recycling processes for these products is newer and therefore less efficient (more costly) as it hasn't had the same time the older processes have had to mature + optimize

To add to this point. A couple of plastic recyclers in my country just went out of business because oil has been made so cheap recently that they are simply priced out of the plastics market. According to interviews with the founders, in the oil and plastics game there is a sense of having to freeze out these new entrants to the market for a little while.

> You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive. The sustainability part is one of the most powerful signals captured by price.

That's true, but only if we're running into short term shortages or it's actually becoming scarce due to depletion. It's possible for a resource to be finite but bountiful over large time scales.

Renewable/sustainable resources usually have a large infrastructure cost, have yet to benefit from decades of process refinement, and until they've capture a significant market share can't reap the benefits of mass production.

So it's expected that new sustainable methods will cost more until they catch up. There's vertical and horizontal integration efficiencies to work out, there's supply chains to optimize, production methods to scale and optimize, market share to capture, etc. If anything, I'm skeptical of things claiming to be better cheaper overnight successes - it's too good to be true.

It’s because the recycled option includes the costs that should have been paid by the plastic producers the first time around.

At some point, the societal costs of producing a product or material will be taxed or otherwise accounted for at the time of production.

Until then, the maths is gonna be kind screwy like this.

> You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive.

Except for oil. Oil is basically what backs the global economy. What it means is that when oil’s prices are raising a little, the global economy just automatically slows down enough to reduce the demand and keep the prices where they are.

That’s why oil prices are an illusion.

But more importantly, the issue with oil is not (only) the price, it’s that there is still enough oil reserves for the humanity to fuck the climate for thousands of years.

In both case we are going to lack oil. But we will suffer pretty differently given it’s voluntary or not.

Which is more expensive to produce, a brand new bowl, or a bowl that was smashed and then painstakingly glued back together again?

Why constrain production to "painstakingly gluing back together" a broken bowl? And if reuse and recycling are desirable, why make bowls out of materials that are easily breakable and difficult to repair or recycle in the first place?

> The price is a proxy for materials and energy required to produce the product.

Maybe for commodities, but in general that isn't true.

I think in general it's true but not for every case.

If I can produce something that provides the same benefit at a lower expense I can undercut you.

This fact actually drives de materialization that has led to things like simpler packaging and a reduction in emissions in the US and other industrialized countries over the last 30 years (both absolute and per capita)

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

> The price is a proxy for materials and energy required to produce the product.

You're right. Prices reveal true preference and constraints. The market is a machine for answering the question "What should we be working on?". Sometimes, people don't like the answers the market produces and invent justifications for distorting or ignoring price signals. In the limit, this practice amounts to a command economy. Disregarding price signals makes us all worse off and we shouldn't do it.

If something is expensive, that means it's scarce, and if it isn't, that means it isn't. If there's some negative externality you think the market isn't capturing, well, capture that externality. Put a number on it; don't make it a moral issue. It's only through numbers that we understand the world.

> If there's some negative externality you think the market isn't capturing, well, capture that externality. Put a number on it; don't make it a moral issue.

The problem is that the people not paying for these externalities don't want to, have no incentive to, and are not required to. They lobby to avoid laws and regulations that would make them do it.

So meanwhile we have people dying due to air and water pollution created by people who don't want to pay for their externalities. FooCorp doesn't care if the country's health care costs go up because of that; they still make more money than they would if they had to pay for their externalities.

The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.

> The problem is that the people not paying for these externalities don't want to, have no incentive to, and are not required to. They lobby to avoid laws and regulations that would make them do it.

Perhaps the externalities are exaggerated then? If you say something is scarce and the market says it's abundant, who's right? You? Why?

The fact is that Lego isn't, to any meaningful degree, contributing to adverse outcomes by using petroleum as a feedstock. The market tells them they got the right answer. Their oil use is a drop in the bucket. They shouldn't feel pressured to worsen their product over moral and aesthetic pressure from activists.

> The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.

The market is working just fine. The trouble is that the moralizers don't like the priority stack rank the market produces and seek to use various forms of non-market power to get the outcomes they want. People doing this makes us all worse off. Trust the market.

>Trust the market.

We do not.

You don't understand things so you call them BS?

Weird.

Being able to reuse or recycle a material doesn't make it less energy intensive to acquire in the form you need it to be for your purposes. I don't know why you think otherwise.

I don't know, if I reuse or recycle something it's cheaper or free.

For instance, a restaurant may reuse utensils by washing them. Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.

That's the whole point of reusing and recycling. Reducing my cost. Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.

So yeah I call bs

> That's the whole point of reusing and recycling. Reducing my cost.

When reuse or recycling is saving consumers money and/or making companies money, everyone already does it. Things like salvaging copper wiring from old buildings or putting wrecked cars into junk yards to be stripped of useful parts and scrapped.

> Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.

This assumes the cost of getting raw materials is greater than that of salvaging old materials. This is true for metals which is why you see people collecting used cans or recycling phones for "free". But it's not true for plastics (petroleum is ridiculously cheap and easy to get) which is why you don't see corporations fighting to collect the Pacific garbage patch or offering free recycling services for consumers to get at their waste plastic.

Lol tf? Plastics typically are not reusable, so now you're left with recycling. Many plastics like PET can be pretty easily recycled and come in few colors. It's unfortunate that there are also there are piles of different plasitc formulations that cannot be mixed and easily recycled. It's easy and cheap to mix pure feeds took, it's not easy to get the plasticizers and coloration out.

Your example of reusing utensils assumes cleaning is free.

Let's say that COVID v2 requires restaurants to sterilize utensils so thoroughly that it costs $1000 per utensil. Obviously at that point most restaurants would opt to just buy new utensils each time.

> if I reuse or recycle something

Reuse, sure, but I doubt you have the equipment required to recycle paper, glass, metals, plastic, etc. If you did, I'm sure you'd know that equipment was probably pretty expensive to purchase, and far from free to operate.

> Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.

That's not really "recycling", that's just another form of reuse.

> it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.

That's if it's being reused. Most people don't reuse all that much of what they consume. Think soda cans or bottles, jars of peanut butter or jams, plastic laundry detergent containers, paper or plastic grocery bags, etc. Most of that ends up being thrown away after being used once.

It's great when people reuse those things over and over after their initial use, but the reality is that very few people actually do so.

All of this is why very little of the plastic we toss in recycling bins actually gets recycled. It's just not economically feasible to recycle all that plastic. For decades now we've shipped all of it overseas, but a lot of those places have stopped taking our plastic, because they don't want it either.

You're describing reusing, but calling it recycling. None of your examples are recycling - reusing a milk crate as decor is reuse.

For an example of recycling, try evaluating the cost of making a milk crate out of plastic bags vs. virgin plastic.

To abstract and simplify the issue.

Imagine there's a material A that there's only 100,000 of left.

It takes only 1 energy to consume it and turn it into a single product. Also using it could cause -5 damage to the environment.

You realize however that it is not sustainable, it's going to be done at some point in the future.

You start to look for solutions. You find a new material that can replace the other material B, however it's not as good for making the products. It takes 5 energy to consume it and it takes 3 energy to make the product and then when recycled it takes another 3 energy.

> a restaurant may reuse utensils by washing them.

Can't just the employee cost of gathering and placing them in a dishwasher, the fraction of the cost of the dishwasher machine itself, sorting them out, replacing the quantity that got stolen or thrown in the garbage by mistake or damaged, the accounting of mistakes where dirty or otherwise unsanitary ones are handed to customers, etc... exceed the cost of disposable?

It's not a theoretical concern. Or at least any theoretical concern is not hugely useful in the practical operation of a restaurant.

But if you're not reusing things as they are, at the site where you already have it, then you need a whole system to collect, clean, and sort it.

Additionally, the price of new materials does not include what it costs to get rid of them, nor does it typically include the cost of fixing what gets destroyed (like nature or human fertility) when its made or discarded.

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