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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

Recycling is mostly a lie. Plastic can’t really be usefully recycled. Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible. There is already more paper and cardboard than can be consumed. Clean aluminum and steel containers recycle well, but are not a lot of volume, and don’t burn.

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Aluminum and steel are easy to extract from the waste stream, run the waste stream past a magnet to separate the ferrous metals, then run the waste stream past an eddy current separator to separate out the aluminum/copper/zinc.

Recycling household waste is dumb and a massive waste of resources. Burning the trash after extracting the metal would be optimal.

Isn't burying in a landfill better than burning considering the carbon sequestration considerations of burning what will likely be plastic products? At least with burying we are a little bit closer to putting the oil energy back under the surface of the earth vs having it around in the atmosphere.

If you capture the heat from the burning, e.g. to generate electricity, then that can save burning oil/gas/coal instead.

Furthermore, the landfill will usually also generate gasses like methane, which need to be burned off too.

Europeans seemed to manage to figure the problem out. It’s a cultural problem, not a scientific one. Because it requires gen pop to accept some sort of civic responsibility to do it properly, something Europeans have much more inkling to do

>Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible

A 16 year old with an Arduino can do the obvious part, what's the hard part that I'm missing? Scale/volume?

> Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible

Fortunately we have digital image sensors. Or we can just mix two batches of sand glass to get the desired tone.

The real problem recycling glass is everything that is not glass. Just a tiny dirt will start a crack in the bottle. If your bottle has some soil on it, dumping it with the non recycling lot is the more polite and correct behavior

Strange. And why did paper and cardboard prices go up during COVID and recycling companies asked to _not_ put paper into the rest?

Your statements do not make sense.

Household waste recycling mostly works if you sort the materials at source. If you have separate bins for glass, metal, and paper+cardboard, all of them can be recycled economically. Plastic recycling only works for industrial waste, as you can't really expect consumers to identify and sort all the different types of plastic.

I agree, we have single stream where I live and just understanding the logistics of how single stream works it’s easy to see that single stream leads to a large portion of recycling material simply being discarded because of the reality of sorting

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