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In some cases but the economics need to be improved. Companies don’t have to pay for the externalities so it’s often cheaper to build new things instead of recycling, but if that shifted we’d see a lot more capacity arise.

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Yep, this is one of those things where it is technically possible but economically not yet.

There is a reason a lot of this stuff gets handled in the worst way possible, it is the only economics that work so far.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvq1rd0geo

I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to handle international shipping being so cheap. If there were mountains of nominally-recyclable stuff building up in Hoboken, I think we’d have some kind of tax or regulatory fix because it’s harder to ignore a problem which is that easy to document. When it’s being sent through four levels of subcontractor on the other side of an ocean, people can just choose not to see problems which don’t obviously affect their kids but whose fixes would raise prices.

Isn't that why so much of it ends up in the third world where they break it down and get the valuable parts out under horrible conditions?

Just like old cruise boats

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