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Comment by tesdinger | Hacker News Reader

For the sake of the generations that come after us, we really should not dump valuable material into space. I somehow doubt the electronics in space would be recovered and recycled properly.

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Nothing is recycled properly. Recycling was a story told to ease consumers minds so they keep on consuming. The stuff you throw away ends up on a landfill, in the sea, or on a ship to someplace else where it gets burned and then buried. Sending it to space makes absolutely no difference.

Most steel and aluminum and nearly all copper is recycled

How do you know?

It would be relatively obvious from the difference between production and mining output.

So is there public data?

Places decent money for it

At some point a massive landfill will become more economically viable to mine for rare or useful elements than an actual mine. There is a good case for piling rubbish into to a well-managed landfill for future generations to mine with better technologies.

Also, burning plastic waste in a power plant at least liberates the energy for use. One can argue it's just fossil fuels that spent time doing something useful before it became energy.

Taking rare elements to space only for it to stay up there or burn up in the atmosphere removes it from this whole equation.

Might be true in the US, but its a lie in many other countries, a lie typically peddled by climate change deniers. Paper, cardboard, glass, metal, plastic bottles is certainly recycled to a high degree here (up to 99% for some of these categories), but plastics other than bottles are hard because there's so many types of it and its usually stuck to something else.

Around 9–14% of plastics are recycled worldwide, and almost none of electronics or other products that would have to be disassembled first.

I don’t know where "here" is for you, but even a country like Germany only manages to recycle 38% of plastics overall, and a huge portion of that is plastic bottles - the lowest-hanging fruits of the recycling tree.

And all the while, every day millions of single-use vapes are sold and discarded, each of which containing a microcomputer and rechargeable battery. Recycling is a lie.

Guess you just ignored the items I wrote.

I don't think I did; what you wrote just doesn't really address the problem. Yes, in a few industrial countries, raw materials that can be easily separated will be recycled. But that just isn't the real problem, when all the electronics and glued components and biological waste and mixed trash are impossible to recycle. People are told to just buy more stuff all the time, to a point where maintenance or repairs are economically unsustainable for many things. And I also don't understand how pointing out this travesty is somehow a climate change denier position.

I dont disagree, but your original statement was extremely broad.

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