Hacker News Reader

Comment by memnips | Hacker News Reader

For a different perspective I found this older article which ponders the economic impact of forcing 9 million people to spend time and energy sorting their trash: http://mises.org/daily/2855

View on HN

I find sorting garbage to be better and cleaner for me, personally, actually. You don't have one large festering heap in your home, you have three heaps and only one of them actually smells. The rest are used up plastic containers, bottles, paper, etc. - materials that don't decompose on their own. You get to throw all the biological waste in one place, which can be smaller than the rest and you can clean it up every other day. You can of course throw all your trash away every other day, but it's easier when you only have to throw away only a small portion of it.

I currently live in a city that doesn't collect trash separately and I still separate my trash - it's just nicer and cleaner.

The marketing budget needed to convince people to transition to the new model will pay itself off shortly. Consider also that you'll get unpaid "split-trash evangelists" in most neighbourhoods doing your work for you.

... an article which of course assumes that the costs of the (not spelled out) alternatives are zero...

My parents do this and it's not like it's very onerous.

Well, the point he makes is that the same is true for the other statistics. It'd probably be cheaper environmentally for a garbage truck to pick up all your garbage for instance, rather than each person traveling to the recycling center themselves.

I've lived in a couple of villages/towns/cities in Sweden, and the garbage trucks do pick up the sorted household garbage. Recycling centers are for stuff like old furniture, used engine oil, etc.

I guess you could implement a system for that too. Inform the city when you have less common items to throw away and when the quota for your neighborhood is full, a truck gets dispatched to pick it up. Would require some extra infrastructure I guess, but it might be worth it.

Here in Portugal - or at least, in many municipalities - you can call up the city and arrange for them to pick it up at a certain day, for free (yes, it's paid by taxes, yada yada).

They take furniture, appliances and green waste (from gardens and such).

In Oakland you get one free "bulk load" trash pickup a year kindly provided by Waste Management.

In Australia, virtually no one travels to the "recycling center themselves" - we have three bins (green waste, recyclables [paper/card/plastics/tins/etc], general). General waste is picked up from the kerb each week, while the other two are picked up on alternate weeks. Even accounting for the more frequent pick-ups of general waste, I still produce more recycling (wine bottles, etc) or green waste (weeding, pruning, etc) than general rubbish.

Last I checked, no one is "forced" to do anything. They are free to let the trash pile up in their homes, so long as they keep it from impacting their neighbors. Instead, the service of trash disposal is being offered with restrictions.

And if you wish to engage a more sane trash disposal service?

That article is biased and full of exaggerations (and possibly also outright errors). I live inside the city in Stockholm and have lived both in a suburb and a small town in another part of Sweden in my life. No one I've met spend much time "cleaning and sorting" their garbage. Sure, we might rinse out our cans and milk cartons before putting them in their respective bags underneath the sink, but that takes probably less than three seconds, and we do it mostly so that it won't smell. I've never met anyone that separates the paper from cans. Everyone I know would laugh at such ideas.

Furthermore, the kinds of things we recycle from day to day do not consist of more than 6 categories. Two colors of glass, metal (cans mostly), cartons, paper, plastic. Everyone I know collects this in their own home in paper bags, and then leaves them at a collection point close to their house when they get full. And of course, we don't normally take an extra trip to do this. I leave it on my way to the subway, other people might leave them when they take the car to work. It's really not much of an extra workload. I'm guessing I spend 15 minutes a month on my recycling.

Then we have more rare trash. Electronics, batteries, light bulbs, wood, paint etc. For the suburbs and small towns they have larger recycling plants in each municipality which you can drive to. They have shipping containers where you dump your old bikes, tv's, your large pine tree that you cut down to get some more sun in your yard, etc. A typical family might visit this place one to three times a year to dump some more hazardous or clunky trash.

If you live in an apartment complex (and possibly don't have access to a car) there's usually a room in the complex for all of these things. They have the plastic, glass, metal, batteries and electronics containers close to your own apartment.

For me who live in the city and don't have access to a car, there is actually a truck that comes around a few times a year for me to deposit these things. It has a few collection points close to me (within walking distance) and sends out a text message to my phone a few weeks before they're coming, besides having a schedule online.

Having been raised in this type of a recycling system, I'm always amazed by people, even in Sweden, who think it's too cumbersome. Sure, it happens that I forget to empty my recycling bins at the collection points some times, and then I do throw cartons and cans in my regular garbage (which from what I know is not illegal, btw). But in general there really isn't any noticeable overhead.

Mr Bylund's article has some points, but I rather read scientific critisism than political.

Libertarians don't like recycling because it's a political intervention into the market.

Not only do they dislike that on principal, if people start to like any one particular intervention (which many people do with recycling) then it undermines their entire political approach.

Thank you!

I really think the fact that Sweden is 30 time smaller than the US is a significant aspect of the problem, which ought to be highlighted a bit more when doing a comparison between these two countries on their energy models.

How hard would it be for the US to implement such solution (assuming the cost would not be as prohibitive as it is compared with nuclear energy), first in a large city like NY (or LA) as a test bed? Maybe something like that already exist in the States?

Trash sorting is an embarrassingly parallel problem.

Japan has about a third of our population and they do garbage sorting pervasively. I believe it's less onerous than the Swedish scheme, though.

About ten years ago, in Tokyo, at least the business districts, it was somewhat difficult to find public trash receptacles rather than recycling receptacles. The recycling setups I saw were typically three-ish receptacle configurations.

Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.

>Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.

Or look up Lancaster, PA (one county over from Harrisburg) and how their trash->energy plant "is considered a national model for waste disposal, featured in industry trade publications."[1], and how they (Lancaster county) are in the process of buying the Harrisburg facility.[2]

[1] http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/08/tale_of_t... [2] http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/856655_County-waste...

Yeah because a mismanaged city project in a dysfunctional city is a great example of the actual technology, especially when you hire totally unqualified companies to do it. But hey, we could have spent all that money on a Wild West Museum instead or maybe just prayed some more for a balanced budget.

Yeah, that comment was a little snarkier than I had intended it to be. My point was more that it had been tried in the US, but in this one case it failed, mostly because of complete incompetence. Not that the tech was bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com