Hacker News Reader

Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

"Most recycled materials should be cheaper than virgin commodities"

Surprisingly this just isn't true. It takes a lot of work and chemicals to clean inks and glues out of paper for recycling.

Penn & Teller looked into this in an episode of Bullshit! a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4

Aluminum and clear glass are very efficient to recycle, plastics and colored glass depend on commodity prices, and paper is just a terrible idea to recycle. It's much better for the environment to farm trees for making paper, then put that paper in landfills and harvest the methane gas the paper emits when it decomposes.

View on HN

Conventional wisdom -- as well as Wikipedia and pretty much all other references I found -- says that recycling paper is better for the environment, because it uses fewer resources (energy, water), among other things. I'm not ruling out that conventional wisdom et al. are incorrect, but I think I'd prefer something other than a TV show.

That episode of Bullshit kinda missed the point, IIRC.

Energy consumption is an important thing to pay attention to, but the point of recycling is about not taking more stuff out of the ground.

But putting paper product back into the ground is the cycle of life... accelerated. Instead of waiting for the tree to die and fall and rot and return nutrients to the soil it gets chopped down, pulped up, made into paper, turned into a magazine, gets purchased and read one time, shredded and returns to the ground to rot at an increased rate than the original tree would have rotted.

...the only difference is that when the original tree rotted, it didn't leach chemicals into the soil from the inks, bleaches and other chemicals used in the production of the magazine.

So contaminants aside, composting paper instead of recycling it is actually better for the environment - assuming renewable tree harvesting practices are followed.

Of course, you can't actually put the contaminants aside nor assume that renewable harvesting practices are being used, so even this argument is flawed. At some point, the only way to affect the environment positively is to stop buying as many of the paper products as you can reasonably avoid buying.

It's also over 11 years old! Just guessing the industry and tech built around recycling has changed a bit.

A lot of energy comes out of the ground.

I would believe it. If the problem really is a supply/demand imbalance, the market should correct it. But nobody will pay me for my used plastic bottles.

> But nobody will pay me for my used plastic bottles.

In California and some other US states, you can sell them, though this is in part due to a redemption fee charged when you buy them. Here's a price chart from this year (price per pound):

Aluminum Cans - $1.59 Glass Bottles - $0.104 #1 PETE Plastic Bottles - $1.16 #2 HDPE Plastic Bottles - $0.59 #3 PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) - $0.56 #4 LDPE Plastic Bottles -$2.03 #5 PP Plastic Bottles - $0.60 #6 PS Plastic Bottles - $5.69 #7 Others Plastic Bottles - $0.31 Bimetal - $0.35

This is profitable enough that crews of people come around to steal curbside recyclables in many California cities [1].

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Battle-brews-over-raiders...

Perhaps someone better versed in economics can help me here:

isn't this the type of thing where a tax might be useful- for example, a tax on products that use 'new' plastic/glass as opposed to recycled? basically, convert the 'cost' of garbage everywhere into an actual cost?

I don't think it's necessary, because people already pay to dispose of garbage. The cost isn't borne by the manufacturer, but as long as it's borne by somebody involved in the transaction, it'll be accounted for.

Taxes are useful to capture externalities, where the costs imposed are on other people unrelated to the transaction. For example, taxing air pollution helps to capture the costs it imposes on the general population, which the manufacturer and their customer could otherwise ignore.

Problem is, people paying to dispose of garbage are not paying the entire environmental cost of the growing landfill. They're just (barely) paying the operational cost of transporting their junk to the landfill. In a perfect world, your garbage bill would include the total environmental impact of your choice to use and throw away disposable products. Until the "throw it away" lifestyle hits people's wallets, it's not going to change.

Quantifying that cost is a challenge--maybe start with how much $$ it would take to "un-product" the product and return it back to the raw materials it came from. In some cases, we'd find it probably costs more to un-make a product than it was sold for.

Could also (in addition to, or instead of) charge the MANUFACTURER for a portion of this shared environmental cost, as they ultimately chose to make a product designed to be turned into pollution.

That's a good point. I think the best approach there would be to tax the landfills themselves.

I wouldn't want to put a tax on the manufacturers, because you'll end up discouraging reuse. You don't want somebody who comes up with a novel way of using old Coke bottles to pay the same as somebody who just pitches them.

In the UK we have a landfill tax in an attempt to drive up recycling rates which alongside kerb collection of recyclables has worked

Unfortunately it's also leading to local government approving incinerators for other types of rubbish

It turns out this is referred to as a Pigovian tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Why do you go for the route of punishment (taxes) and not try positive reinforcement instead like incentives and or tax breaks?

I'm a homeless vagabot, and included the caveat that I'm not well versed in economics, so the glut of options wasn't apparent to me.

Or a mix of both: start charging (more) for waste disposal but make recycling pickup free.

I'm no big fan of taxes and big govt.

How are incentives and tax breaks any less "big government" than a tax itself? You still need an agency to oversee the administration of the incentive and tax break. That argument isn't anti-big government, it's "I don't want to pay for my negative externalities".

Taxes are a cost of doing business. Tax breaks and incentives is unearned income.

Just for the record, I'm not in favor of big biz either.

Apparently from the discussion here, working with recycled material is more costly for corporations and therefore they

would not be compelled to give up profits to save the environment and improve sustainability.

So, it's now either the people's or the govt's duty to step in and try to mitigate the risk since the market dynamics are

not favorable to work on their own.

People or govt could help by subsidizing the cost of recycling the materials and making it more appealing for businesses to

use them in their manufacturing processes and therefore preserving the environment.

As to which is better raising taxes or giving tax breaks from the point of view of govt interference, I believe that

incentive is less invasive and more importantly less coercive than raising taxes and distorting the market and pushing the

increase in operating costs to the consumers instead.

So what? Figure out if the idea is likely to work and judge it based on its merits. Unless you're ready to prove that "taxes and big govt" necessarily and inexorably lead to adverse outcomes because of basic physical laws, the way you're evaluating policy proposals is totally irrational.

This is one of the reasons we have seperate collection bags for recyclable materials in the UK for households. We don't have the benefit of landfill space, and it's economically more efficient to seperate paper, glass, metals and other potentially recyclable materials at source, than at a post process stage. The resident has two bins side by side, and sorts at source.

Assuming your talking about the homeowner sorting each type of material seperately, it depends on local facilities. Some have "single-stream" plants that take all recycling mixed together, which seems like it may be the way forward as the sorting machines get more efficient and ingenious.

> paper is just a terrible idea to recycle

It's a bad idea to make paper the way we do now in the first place. Pulping and bleaching is energy intensive and involves a bunch of not-so-friendly chemicals resulting in a bunch of pollutants.

Omitting the bleaching would help, or at least finding a different way to do it.

>then put that paper in landfills

Shouldn't it be able to be downcycled cheaply? Like shredded paper products for things like insulation and other filler?

The paper would have to be perfectly clean. Post-comsumer paper is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com