Recycling is Garbage (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Recycling is Garbage (1996)

nytimes.com

38 pointsmhb55 comments

When I tell people that digging through our trash at work to recover some semi-recyclable plastic they're not really saving anything except for recycling companies bottom line I get looked at like I'm some horrid monster.

Recycling non-rare/poisonous materials is a scam designed to make the general population think they're helping the Earth while the industries that do the real polluting can continue on uninterrupted. An improvement of 1-2 mpg in over the road trucks (semis) will make a vast difference in the amount of road pollution generated.

From a money point of view, sure.

But consider the Earth like some large spaceship. Folks are supposed to take turns cleaning the oxygen recyclers. Somebody says "Hey, I can earn more imaginary merit points by organizing a birthday party, or 100 other things"

So nobody cleans the oxygen recycler, and they all die.

Recycling is an inevitable outcome of living in a closed-system life-support system. Like our planet. Its gotta be done, regardless of the micro-optimizations folks make up to excuse themselves from doing it.

I don't know if you read any of the article - it doesn't sound like it - but I'd be interested to hear your response to some of its claims.

Mainly, sure, Earth is like a space ship, but waste disposal is not like cleaning the oxygen system. You take all your garbage, bury it in a landfill, and problem solved. We have nearly limitless space to bury garbage, and when it comes time, we can bury garbage in old landfill sites.

That is, for anything that isn't rare or hazardous. So what do you have to say about that? I'm curious because I do recycle all I reasonably can, but it sounds like that isn't really helpful.

> we can bury garbage in old landfill sites.

How's that going to work? Landfills don't decompose. In fact many of them are treated not to, since people don't like the smell and they don't want toxic stuff getting in to the water table.

Landfills literally just sit there. Forever.

So eventually when the cost of finding/creating new materials makes recycling economically feasible we "mine" old landfills and use the materials. The landfill materials become the new raw material for manufacture.

...except that they distribute the material so thinly, its unlikely it'll ever be economical to mine. Even the 'original' mines e.g. copper, iron, need very high mineral densities to make them worthwhile. Landfills are orders of magnitude less dense.

There is more gold in a ton of garbage electronics than there is in a ton of gold ore.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646

Cool! If only electronics were concentrated somehow in a landfill, instead of thinly spread around.

What? Why would the material be distributed thinly? It's not like they rake it all over the desert. It's extremely concentrated.

Concentrated ore is essentially solid material of a single nature. Nothing resembling that occurs in landfills. Its a big pile of 'stuff' with pellets of interesting materials every few meters. That's many orders of magnitude too sparse to be worth mechanically mining.

Of course landfills decompose, that's an absurd assertion. If they're treated not to decompose, then they were put in the wrong place obviously.

Clearly some things in the landfill don't decompose, but like others have pointed out, they will someday become profitable to mine if they're full of so much concentrated stuff.

Read up on landfills. There's little or no effort to make them decompose. Impermeable soil layers are deposited to expressly prevent mixing and mulching, since that would allow contaminated water to travel from layer to layer.

Under the narrow definition of garbage provided (household waste), and using the system of imaginary points (what is cheaper instead of what costs our environment more), then sure that's the conclusion the OP came up with. After endless fables and allegories and precious little actual numbers.

The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper, yet somehow the garbage will fit in a smaller space is on the surface preposterous.

That landfills are any kind of solution is also very debatable. They poison the area around for generations. My local town, very PC and very educated, has a massive landfill groundwater plume that destroys wells and makes soil toxic for 20 miles 'downwind'. Did we do it wrong? Who does it right?

You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'?

We have endless space, sure, as long as we're willing to consume it in those ways. Ecology to burn! We'll never need it, surely. Certainly we won't miss it, its outside of town and nobody goes there.

>You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'?

Yes, we have all heard of the extreme hyperbole surrounding it, such as calling it a "continent."

>The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper,

Paper has been grown a crop using fast growing, poplar-like trees for decades now. In fact, we have tens of thousands of acres of paper trees that will never be harvested because email caused the demand for paper to plummet.

Hyperbole notwithstanding, its an enormous volume of ecology impacted by garbage. The words exaggerate the mass of the thing (its like 1 piece of garbage per cubic foot of water) but not the extent of it.

The tree thing was about the space it takes to dispose of it all, not the cutting of the trees. That a few square miles of landfill will be enough for 1000 years for everybody is a laughable notion.

Paper decomposes so fast it's ridiculous to be concerned with the space it takes up in a landfill. There is nothing to worry about with paper.

Also, "a few square miles of landfill"? Maybe you're talking about a different country, but the US has such an enormous amount of land with low population density, we could spend hundreds of square miles on landfill, and you know what? Landfills aren't permanent! They turn into just land. Land you could use for: a landfill. It doesn't take an ever increasing amount of landfill to deal with garbage.

Paper doesn't decompose at all once its covered with soil. Landfills last for centuries. Archaeologists love digging them up. Read up on it.

>"Yes, we have all heard of the extreme hyperbole surrounding it, such as calling it a "continent.""

And don't forget to mention the stock-image that most fear-mongering articles regarding this topic use. It's usually an entire image filled with plastic trash that's floating above murky-dark water. It grabs peoples' attention, but misrepresents the extent of the problem by evoking forced emotion on individuals who think that there is quite literally "a floating island/continent of plastic trash in the ocean somewhere". Sadly, a lot of environmental issues are dealt with like this, with fear mongering rather than objective and calm discussions.

>"groundwater plume that destroys wells and makes soil toxic for 20 miles 'downwind'. Did we do it wrong? Who does it right?"

I'm not a big expert on this. But this sounds like a big lesson (possibly one that could have been guessed prior). That you can apply to the next landfill: Move it to the middle of nowhere, perhaps a desert or something if you're worried about populated areas.

But if we can only use space in the middle of nowhere, it becomes much less "nearly limitless".

In fact, it becomes much more limitless. Almost everywhere in the united states is in the middle of nowhere. We could be talking about a different country, sure. But nobody says the garbage has to end up right where it's generated.

Its easy for the folks who live in cities to imagine everywhere else is just wasted ground, the middle of nowhere. Come out here sometime and learn. Every place is owned, farmed, grazed, used by somebody. There's no such thing as nowhere.

The US government owns 28% of the land in the country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands) - Most of this land is not being used for parks or any other public resource - it simply is unused and unoccupied.

Much is leased for grazing, mining.

With the exception of aluminum, consumer recycling is total nonsense. (Industrial recycling is extremely important and profitable.)

Putting recyclables on an oil burning truck to an oil burning processing plant is dubious at best.

"Hey, I can earn more imaginary merit points by organizing a birthday party, or 100 other things"...So nobody cleans the oxygen recycler, and they all die.

Only in an oppressive system, where people are restricted in how they can distribute their merit points, sure. Given enough freedom and a high enough population, however, and people will start to pay another merit points so they can earn more merit points as a star birthday party planner.

I don't think it's fair to say recycling is "designed" to be "scam".

In my city, the recycling program was designed to meet specific waste diversion goals. There is no empty land for new dumps within city limits, and the cost of shipping waste elsewhere is high. It's a rational economic decision.

Yes, reducing world-wide air pollution would make a bigger difference. Sure, you might find some specific cities that are running recycling programs in an uneconomic way. And, if you feel like informing your coworkers that they aren't saving the earth, you're not lying to them.

But recycling programs, by and large, are not a scam to make people feel better. They save money.

Recycling is popular because, especially in America where we don't even sort our materials. It provides a zero effort way for people to feel like they're helping the environment. The only real way to produce less waste is to consume less and most people aren't interested in actually inconveniencing themselves.

"...especially in America where we don't even sort our materials."

I've lived an 7 states from coast to coast, north and south, and in all but 2 we sorted our materials. Just because it doesn't happen where you are from doesn't mean it's not happening everywhere else.

I'm curious how much sorting is the norm where you've been. Where I've lived "sorting" recycling has simply been one bin for glass and another for everything else which barely counts.

This article discusses the problems that are created by "one-binning" our recycling:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/american-rec...

The problems are mostly a collision of too much recycling, too much expectation for post-bin sorting, a disconnect about the value of recyclable materials (glass is heavy but almost worthless), outfall of the death of the newspaper industry, and reduction in packaging materials (thinner plastic bottles, movement from coffee cans to coffee bags).

In the City of Seattle, they were paying about $50/ton to landfill trash in 2011. A city official said they were only working with Cedar Grove while the costs for recycle and compost were below that. The city is mentioned in the article for the addition of composting to its recycling program, and how this keeps more trash out of landfills.

> The only real way to produce less waste is to consume less

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwcap_-9tuA&t=0m20s

Having only two kids and ending all immigration makes more sense. Population growth utterly dwarfs the impact of any feasible consumption reduction approaches.

or package better...

A Planet Money recently talked about which items are recyclable, which are not, and how global economic trends effect them. Like how China buys our recycled plastic, unless oil prices dip low enough it's cheaper to make new plastic.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episo...

Also, this article is from 1996? I'd like to know what has changed (and what hasn't) in the last 20 years.

Re: article from 1996

That is exactly what I was wondering. It would be awesome to have a follow up on this!

The utility of recycling depends a whole lot on the material.

(1) Is the material common?

(2) Is recycling it less energy intensive than mining/refining it?

(3) Is it nasty in a landfill? Does it leak, pollute groundwater, etc.?

Aluminum, batteries, electronics, significant amounts of steel, etc. make a lot of sense to recycle. In some cases it's quite profitable without any subsidy. Glass and paper on the other hand, not so much. Paper is an agricultural product, and glass is mostly SiO2 which is an absurdly common material (sand).

As usual the truth here is a lot more complex than the sound bites.

I wonder whether it takes more carbon emissions to recycle paper than it does to dump the paper in a big old landfill and sequester its carbon away, and manufacture some new paper.

http://epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/tools/warm/pdfs/BackDocFore...

Exhibit 4 has some numbers you'd probably find useful, such as the benefit or recycling in terms of tonnes of Carbon per ton of paper recycled. It looks like about 0.6-0.75 tonnes of Carbon per ton of recycled paper.

also depends where you are. If physical space is at a premium, extending a community's landfill's life by diversion can be worth the cost.

Of course, though in systems where the material is sorted for collection, there's a significant amount of value added for free (in fact, it's double-dipping for the haulers, since they charge for their service, and sell the sorted materials). Now, my impression from looking at curbside sorting in my neighborhood is that the value-add is not great, lots of marginal or flatly forbidden things are mixed in, so I understand that human beings still eyeball everything once more, on a conveyor belt, and then automated sorting separates things further, neither of which are free...

I think you might be making the common mistake of confusing "for free" with "using unpaid labor".

Moving from Sweden to California, the recycling system here is still completely bewildering to me, and makes very little sense.

Where I'm from, recycling started by grabbing simple low-hanging fruit. Newspapers. Aluminium cans. Glass bottles and jars. And it doesn't all go into one "recycling bin", but each thing is separated. Later, that expanded so you can now also recycle metal cans, plastic containers and cardboard. If you want to.

And the default was never landfill, instead all household trash is incinerated for heat and electricity. Sweden even imports trash to burn! And in the case people throw the "wrong" things in general trash, the incinerators can handle it, they're very good at exhaust filtering, and I bet you can even mine the residue for rare materials.

And that all makes sense to me. I can see the economics of it, and I can see the environmental impact of sorting. But the California system of one big "recycling" bin that you're supposed to throw god-knows-what in is completely opaque to me. How does anything useful come out of that? How much labour is needed to sort it at the station?

This article discusses some of the problems in the "one-bin" system.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/american-rec...

There's videos on YouTube of "single-stream" MRF facilities. I think Ars Technica just visited one and did a story on the machines involved. They use all sorts of cool tech like computer vision to sort flakes of plastic with tiny jets of air, eddy currents and magnets to sort metal and sonic imploders to disintegrate glass.

There are people involved to pull out things that would jam the machines, but generally it's fairly automatable.

Inside New York City’s newest recycling center - Machines use science to separate a stream of waste into valuable raw materials.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/inside-new-york-citys...

Recycling in the US: An off-again, on-again love affair - It became a booming industry despite facing a series of intractable tradeoffs.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a...

The first thing to realize is that trash is only a problem by some guilt-ridden religious argument. Civilization takes its materials from the ground and it can return them there quite easily. It was John McCarthy who first convinced me (all my life a recycling crusader) of this.[1]

Recycling therefore only makes sense when its energy balance is positive. Aluminum and steel are the only materials for which it is, or ever will be.[2] The process could be greatly simplified by having two bins: "mostly metal" and "everything else".

[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

[2] And lithium in car batteries. But they're not a municipal issue.

If you want the snarkier, video version of this argument: Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit” episode on recycling — http://www.sho.com/sho/penn-and-teller-bullshit/home?episode...

I wasn’t quite convinced, but they make a few cogent points.

the “Straight Dope” rebuttal to the NYT article: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2346/is-recycling-w... — among his points is that recycling is effectively an experiment. Twenty years of ensuing data should be regarded before taking anything in the NYT piece at face value.

Yeah I'm convinced by Penn and Teller of only one thing: they want to be hip and snarky and sell views. Because their arguments are lazy and mean and rarely cogent.

Has anyone else noticed the unusually-high level of indoctrination that goes on regarding recycling/environmentalism in schools? I remember spending countless hours in school as a small child being taught to "heal the world" and "green something" or other. Or cartoons: "Captain Planet" anyone? There were large concerts that were held place at the schools I attended, talking about the topic, singalongs, etc. And then there were the huge "scary number" scenarios: "If each person in the world, turned off X for Y time every time they did B, then we would have saved X,000,000,000 million somethings of C".

I'll leave the discussion of pro/cons regarding recycling et al aside. I am a tad bit disturbed at how intensely I was bombarded as a child to believe in these things. I exaggerate a little in my examples, but these things existed and happened to me, as an innocent blank-slate child.

Recycling etc. is tedious and inconvenient (much easier just to ignore it!), so why would people do it unless society emphatically instills that it's important?

Over here in Belgium, recyclables are sorted by the consumer: glass by colour, paper, plastic/aluminium drink containers, compostables. Whatever is left is burnt for power generation. It's not a perfect system, a lot of plastic especially ends up being burnt. But it's a pretty decent system.

Please don't think that your head-in-the-sand attitude is a good one in any way. Recycling isn't perfect, but polluting oceans or landfills is a lot worse. Dead wildlife, toxic sushi, decreased land value are all real problems.

And sure, getting the mileage of your gas guzzling SUVs up by 1mpg would be nice as well, but please don't delude yourself into removing all personal responsibility here.

I wish there was some reliable data to support or refute this argument.

If we dumped all the trash in your backyard, I'm sure the data would be obvious ;)

Recycling (and the intertwined issue of global warming) are hot button items for those who believe in unrestrained free markets as they're both widely popular examples of government interventions into markets.

Luckily the US has lots of political pundits ready to save us from leftist plots like climate change, recycling and evolution.

It's frustrating. Aluminum is a big win. Steel is a modest win. Paper used to be a modest win, but with the demise of printed newspapers, it's not any more. Cardboard can be recycled, but each time it goes around, the fibers get shorter and it becomes more fragile. Glass unsorted by color is not too useful.

Amusing: around here, aluminum cans go to the local steel recycling plant. Carloads of cans are dumped into the molten steel vat, to precipitate out sulphur. Then the aluminum and sulphur is poured off and hauled to the landfill as slag.

So, its recycling, sort of. And it goes for a useful purpose. But its not new aluminum.

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