What if everything we know about recycling is wrong? | Hacker News Reader

What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

worksinprogress.co

55 pointsmagoghm72 comments

As someone who works in sustainability, and life cycle analysis, it's quite frustrating to see someone who is clearly not technically trained lay out an argument for single-use based on LCA data. Establishing a functional unit is critical for this type of analysis, otherwise yeah, it looks like every single-use item is "more sustainable" than a reusable. That isn't actually how you measure a sustainability scenario in this context. Also, the simplification of these vastly complex problems being presented as if we have been over reacting or too dumb to solve them -- be, as the kids say, so for real. It is exhausting to have non-technical sustainability folks write these articles as if they've provided some insight on how simple this all can be, as if we eggheads got too caught up in our science textbooks. Now we have to spend time undoing the perception that "it's just so simple, landfills and single use aren't that bad" instead of moving forward into better systems and effective action. Either spend 5 minutes talking with someone who actually works in sustainability or don't write these nonsense articles.

Want to get people onboard? Make it cheaper to reuse/recycle.

Reuse is literally free.

A soiled cloth diaper costs nothing to reuse?

Do they not have washing machines where you are?

Any good blogs or articles you can recommend?

I'd like to 2nd schiffern' s comment. Your comment gives a persuasive perception of competence. But that's not sufficient to accept your point. I'd love to have more data and details to work with so I can decide which viewpoint to trust here. So any sources you could provide would be really helpful. otherwise it doesn't sound responsible for me to just trust the "experts" either.

This author does what other pro-industry mouthpieces do: 1. Reference a real scientific study with a genuine but conditional result, 2. Remove the qualifications associated with the study, so they can 3. Make a much stronger rhetorical conclusion.

Or they simply willfully misreport the results.It's exhausting exercise to have to continuously fact-check these shills. Here's just one example from the article:

"Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic."

That is not supported by the cited study. Earlier models estimated highly concentrated emissions; the cited paper concluded that emissions were distributed among far more rivers than previously thought.The cited paper actually helped overturn the older “a handful of rivers cause nearly everything” story. Yet the article uses it to tell essentially that same concentrated-source story.

Also, not "Half of ocean plastic." The paper actually says: “More than 1000 rivers account for 80% of global _riverine plastic emissions_ into the ocean." They did not measure half of all plastic in the ocean. The paper modeled annual floating macroplastic (not microplastics) emissions from rivers to ocean. That is different from: "all plastic already present in the ocean or "all plastic entering the ocean from every source".

I think their use of that paper is a bit sloppy, but you're sort of doing a similar thing by making a strong rhetorical claim "This author does what other pro-industry mouthpieces do" while ignoring the point of the paragraph, "Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean", which is broadly true[1]. North America and Europe account for 5.1% or ocean plastic. India alone accounts for nearly 13%, and the Philippines nearly 37%.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

Worth noting that according to the data in that article, India is below the world average on a per capita basis, roughly 0.7x the world average. The Philippines is 25x the world average per capita.

I almost think the per-capita lens is less useful here, because the issue isn't consumption/use per se but the state capacity to collect trash and dispose of it properly. I also suspect that within India the majority of people produce little to no plastic trash that enters the ocean.

A question I've often wondered: is the "cost" of bad recycling higher or lower than the cost of not recycling?

We've moved a few times over the years and it's often surprising what is and isn't recyclable in different jurisdictions. This means I often find myself putting something into the recycle that isn't recyclable in my current jurisdiction.

Is this worse than just not recycling, let's say on a per unit basis? I.e. is one unit of recyclable material in the landfill more or less bad than one unit of trash in the recycling pipeline?

Not sure there's an answer, but it's a question I've pondered often.

I’ve moved around a lot in Australia, every local government is responsible for the waste/recycling of the area it governs. Even neighbouring local governments have different waste and/or recycling.

The last place I lived before moving 2 months ago, didn’t have recycling bin at all. A unit complex with only one big waste bin. So nice not having to think which bin does this go in.

The language gives off some climate denialist vibes, but the substance is nonetheless true - recycling become both a magical word which is forbidden to be challenged on merit, and it also become a crude hammer to just bash peons to distract from real problems and real solutions. I also appreciate that finally someone says that DAC should happen as a more effective climate change tool.

Lately I'm getting a feel that it's becoming impossible to be a progressive person and criticize some parts of global greenwashing initiatives. One either need to blindly follow the gospel of 12 recycle bins and other inane ideas, or be shut down as a "climate change denier" because one dared to disagree on something.

It’s religion in the making.

It makes so much sense.

Single use > than reusing.

This is why coal is so much cheaper than solar. Oh.

There is so much cherry picking here they could make a pie.

Energy use to make a cotton bag is greater than a plastic bag, ignoring any other metric, therefore we should just throw everything in the landfill because who reuses a bag more than once???

A lot of people it turns out.

Greenwashing is certainly a problem, but it's almost always "recycling" programs for plastics they can't recycle. See chip/crisp bags for example.

but it's not reused

most recycling is just a differently labeled landfill owned by a cartel somewhere in Asia

I'm not saying NOT to recycling. I'm moderately carefully recycle what I can for the past decade. But when I read the inane requests to like wash tetrapacks from inside, or separate every bone from the bio bag, or get a career in chemistry to differentiate between polystyrene and polyurethane and polyethylene and polypropylene and [insert 50 other common plastics] and then on top of that learn how to deal with composite packaging and then study glues used in the packaging and then study what are the latest innovations in the laminated cartons and... and.. It's leaning into craziness imo. Same with demands like for example keep plastic and metal bottles undamaged, taking a 120L stinking bad for months at home, instead of flattening all them into compact flat material pieces and sort them into proper recycling bins. Or stuff like Swiss paying an extortion level tax for every small black mixed bin bag (unsorted or nonrecyclable).

In my opinion that's the path to make people hate recycling instead of voluntarily engaging in it.

Proper recycling improves national security and the well-being of their citizens.

Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.

Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

That's fine if said trash actually ends up in the landfill. When it ends up ont the grass next to the parking lot is when you start to get the idea that we're all living in each others filth.

Also I disagree that energy should be the item to minimize. It makes sense if you are burning stuff for it, but we've known how to get free energy from the sky for quite a while.

If solar energy is free, or close enough not to matter, it's odd that the quote I got for installing it for my house is tens of thousands of dollars. Or that about 700M people don't have electricity, or that 2B people cook with wood, charcoal, dung, etc. But I can see why, if you believe that energy is free, you would have an entirely different view of global and local economics.

using 'roof solar is expensive, therefor solar is expensive" is borderline disingenuous. It's well established that roof solar is freqently not cost effective.

Which has little relation to installing 100 acres worth. and, its likely the ROI will get even higher as we build more solar fields, and more HV transmission lines.

the article and most comments here are focused in the wrong direction.

To me the real and only question is, can burying trash in landfills be made environmentally safe, and is it sustainable enough that we can do it for the next 100 years after which solar powered robots can mine those goldmines for new uses?

my time on earth is limited, and I'd prefer not to spend it handling trash; this waste of human life and potential is an irretrievable cost. I'd prefer not to even have had it dominating and skewing politics since the 1970s. Leisure time before you die is precious, that's something we can all agree on.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535835

> We have plenty of space to put them – less than 0.01 percent of the US is used for landfill, less than 0.001 percent of Australia is, and only about 0.02 percent of Germany is.

Not all space is equally viable. Landfills need to be close enough to populated areas to make waste transportation feasible, while far enough from populated areas to avoid being a blight.

So, sure, you can build a landfill in the very center of the Australian outback, but who's going to use it?

I don't want another landfill. Ours is almost full and they're talking about converting a beautiful valley into the next one. And it's way father out of town. Shipping trash ain't free.

There's a balance between safety, cost, and energy use that should be struck. "Just landfill" doesn't seem to be chasing that balance.

People argueing about regional differences in what is and isn't recyclable in different jurisdictions are kinda funny at some point. Elusive/Evasive actually.

Because they like to argue based on contemporary state of progress and process and well, about a state that incorporates anything from science to politics to whatever…

For example, where I live, we separate our waste, while its clear most of it is going to be burned in a cement factory anyway. Not perfect, but not an actual argument for or against recycling, right?

It's strict here in Switzerland and from what I've heard similarly in Japan. There really isn't much that can actually be recycled - PET can be but other plastics are incinerated to produce electricity so they have to be sorted. Newspaper can be recycled but pretty much no other paper can be so it gets incinerated also. Cardboard can be recycled. And we have to recycle glass and metal. If you do it wrong you may be fined.

My cousin lives in Japan and says buying pringles is a pain because you have to tear the "can" apart into its separate components - metal, paper, and plastic all in one container.

[dupe] Discussion on alt url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535835

The point of this article appears to be that we can double or more our CO2 removal cost efficiency by redirecting resources.

Is this flagged because the economics of carbon management are not relevant to HN? If not, why?

Engineering is about _tradeoffs_. By reducing a complex objective down to a single metric -- in this case, the author chooses energy expenditure -- you can arrive at a great many number of asinine conclusions, such as, single use plastic bags and solo cups are better for the environment...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!

I’ve encountered this same inability to think or count when people claim that the lifecycle emissions of solar panels or batteries wipe out any potential emissions savings from use. It’s easy to confuse people with big numbers!

I would wager the median number of uses per cotton bag is way below 173 store visits.

Based on my own usage patterns i'd get really roughly that number before they fell apart. The trader joes "burlap" style bag I like would get me about 1 trip a week for about 3 years. It is, notably, plastic lined though.

"fell appart", really?

Or do they sometimes have a part of the stitching failing that takes 2 minutes to repair with a needle and a cotton thread?

catastrophic failure, like objects falling through and fraying that makes repair silly for a $3 bag

I bet you're right. Why though? I've gotten thousands of uses out of mine. Even if you shop infrequently that just means they'll wear out more slowly, so surely that's viable for everyone else, maybe with a 7yr break-even point for an every-2-week shopper?

Because I remember to take mine maybe 25% of the time

Yeah they need to stay in the car. It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading.

We actually just get paper bags and reuse them for our recycling items. The paper bag goes into the recycling bin with the rest of the paper.

I actually don’t care if recycling takes more energy. We should save plastics for where they can be best used, and that’s not a one-shot trip to the landfill

> It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading.

So... how are you bringing in the groceries? Making 10 trips stacking things in your hands?

Because people forget their bags sometimes, and now they have 2 more they they need to use every week for 3 years to break even, on top of their previous bags. Because people take home leftovers from restaurants and the restaurant sometimes puts them into reusable bags, but you already have 10 reusable bags at home so it's not like getting another is helping. Because you get takeout or delivery once in a while and the food comes in a reusable bag that you are never going to reuse 100 times, because you already have 20 reusable bags from forgetting them while grocery shopping and taking home leftovers.

Why would it be that low? I am using 3 if them that are around a decade old.

The average cotton bag has an artificially low number by misleading statistics. Alice uses one bag 100 times, Bob uses 99 bags one time each. If you sample a grocery purchase and check how many times that bag is used in its lifetime it is 50.5 on average. But if you sample a bag and check how many times it is used in its lifetime, it is 2.

Not just that, but they go as far as claiming that single-use Solo cups are more environmentally than using a mug. Literally anything made cheap and quick and with little energy is better by their calculus. Doesn't pass the sniff test, IMO.

Not to mention the microplastics. Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.

> Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.

As opposed to ceramic mugs that just materialize in your house? Not sure about you, but I don't have a dilithium powered transporter in my kitchen.

My mug only had to be transported to my house once. With disposable cups that's a recurring expense. Unless you have a dilithium powered replicator.

I have a handful of mugs that I've had for decades at this point, a couple even from my parents kitchen that they used some 30 years and probably before then.

And then there's thrift store mugs - sure they were almost certainly trucked to _somewhere_ a long time ago.

If I bought one cotton bag and used it for my whole life, the argument would seem silly.

In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.

The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.

If you have enough bags, you don’t need to keep accepting new ones. We have used the same collection of bags for over 15 years.

Yet they continue to be manufactured.

Very few people are using a bag to the expected life cycle limit, and even fewer are doing it without WASHING, which is key in doing full LCA (life cycle analysis).

Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.

As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).

The author of this comment thinks everyone is like him or her.

the author of the article does the same

Maybe but there are different things going on: The author of the article suggests that many people are advocating different things, and is trying to present evidence to convince people. The commenter simply says "problem solved" because reuse is possible and everyone is already doing it. But that's just not the truth.

Engineers are often the worst at human understanding. They may understand systems and solutions, but they don't understand people. And often what is needed is to advertise to people the thing they ought to do - so they can come up to the level of the engineer's understanding of said thing. Then the engineer also says Advertising is Bad.

Fun paradoxical world we live in.

I bought 4 quite large heavy duty canvas bags in like 2005 and have been grocery shopping with them since then. I almost never buy more than will fit in those (actually, most trips I just take two of them).

Also the best way to manage waste is to not generate it in the first place.

I visited some places that package nearly all their vegetables and fruits in 1 use plastic containers, this is bonkers.

Right, if we have a limited resource of something valuable, should we just use it up once and throw out the product entirely?

If plastic is so efficient, why wouldn’t we make reusable bags out of it instead of cotton? Why is the argument to waste it?

We aren’t getting more oil.

Plastic can be made from synthetic oil; it's often higher quality as a result. Oil is not a limiting factor.

Plastic is a good mechanism for carbon sequestration. Pull some carbon from the air and use it to make something both useful and permanent.

Plastic, when used properly, significantly reduces food waste. It's a trade-off curve. Like most trade-offs, optimal is likely somewhere in the middle rather than on either extreme.

I was in a city that did a bag ban. Informally I observed a lot of perfectly fine reusable bags being discard. I believe later on this was confirmed that the total amount of waste from bags actually went up since the bag ban was enacted. This doesn't even count the material and energy use to make the reusable bags. I think you be shocked about the actual number of reuses a reusable bag gets.

Do you realize that plastic bags can be reused too? Some of my plastic bags are clocking up to 10 years now with semi-regular use. My first ever shopper is plastic one and it's closing on two decades of regular use. I also reuse thin single use bags, sometimes multiple times if they hold up. E.g. a single use plastic bag I use for my swimming pool slipper had been reused dozens of times by now, just fine. I also have reusable cotton bags too, I only discard bags if they fail completely, regardless of material or construction.

Point is - blindly assigning black and white, all or nothing labels to generic materials is not smart. And the total lifetime environment harm of each product is not so clear cut as both radical greens and CC deniers try to push on us.

The whole cotton bag thing could only work for people who already carry bags around all the time.

OT: I really like the aesthetics of this site.

This was pointed out to me a while ago, but it seems to hold true:

Whether someone appreciates a modern engineered landfill is a useful Shibboleth for distinguishing real evidence-based environmentalism from narcissistic signaling "environmentalism."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44

I'm one of those folks who appreciate a well-engineered landfill. We had a great one in Nevada County, CA. Now that I've moved back to Texas, I've learned the difference the hard way, although not as hard as the people who lost their homes.[1]

1. https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/officials-say-stinky-fir...

You know it's funny, I originally wrote "a good modern engineered landfill," but I felt it was getting too wordy so I deleted the unnecessary word. Based on how my words (apparently) came across, clearly I should've kept it!

Indeed, I should say, a well-managed modern engineered landfill is great, but a poorly-managed modern engineered landfill is terrible. I honestly didn't think this needed to be said, that it was too obvious and too cliche, but indeed on this point of fact we find ourselves in violent agreement with each-other! ;) Cheers mate

Not sure if this counts as 'modern', but I had the unfortunate experience of driving near Seneca Meadows[1] recently. I can't begin to describe the visceral level of horrendous stench that is perpetually downwind of this facility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Meadows_Landfill

I have a cotton bag in my car. I've been using it for 20 years. It was used 173 times probably in the first 3 years. I have a ceramic coffee mug on my desk. It's moved with me through multiple jobs over the last 25 years. It's been used tens of thousands of times. Some goods are naturally disposable like a Kleenex, but much more could be reusable. The math is right there.

Yes, that is the same point I came in to make about mugs. The author cites "1,000 uses" like its some grand, rarely achieved accomplishment in the life of a mug, when 1/3 of that count represents a single year of once-a-day usage. My two mugs are 20 and 10 years old, and when I use one I use it multiple times a day for weeks. Both have far exceeded "1,000 uses" by now, with probably another 30K (?) uses before I die.

I've never seen a coffee mug, or glass drinking vessel wear out. They always end up broken first.

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