16 ms·

Is it time to rethink recycling?

117 points by nkurz 11y ago

danielweber 11y ago
Recycling imposes a cost on me. I would like to know which parts of it are really worth doing and which are not.
- SteveNuts 11y ago
  I really only worry about recycling metal. Soda, canned goods, that sort of thing. I've been a bit skeptical of recycling paper since I started recycling, the trees used for paper are plentiful, and are grown as a crop. Plus, as far as I can understand all the same processes that it takes to make paper from tree pulp are also used when recycling paper, so that seems like a neutral process at best. Plastic I try to reuse whenever possible.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    One other benefit to recycling other than reducing new material usage is keeping stuff out of landfills. Landfills are anaerobic, which means most bacteria that breaks stuff down can't live in them, so things break down extremely slowly[1]. That slow breakdown means we need more space for landfills, which are toxic environments. So even if the recycling process is neutral, or even somewhat more costly than producing new material, keeping stuff out of landfills is another benefit that you might not have considered in your calculation. In addition, cities with recycling programs can actually sell the material they gather back to companies, literally turning garbage into money and creating a revenue source for the city[2,3]. One important component in this is that the cities can get a higher price for higher quality recycling streams, where the output is all composed of one type of material. This is why, even though St Paul is now single-sort, I still separate my paper from the other recycling. It helps keep the paper higher quality by avoiding getting it dirty and wet, and costs me no real effort. [1] http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.ht... [2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-an-off-again-on-again-love-affair/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a... [3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-high-tech-materials-science-with-economics-that-work/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-...
    - henrikschroder 11y ago
      I'm from a place where less than one percent of all household waste ends up in a landfill, so moving to the US and learning that most of my trash actually just goes on a dump somewhere was quite a shock to me. So why doesn't the US have more trash incinerators? It seems like such a no-brainer to me if you care about the environment?
      - coldpie 11y ago
        Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking, I don't know and this is something I'd love to be better educated about. Seems like you'd have lots of toxic fumes from burning, which may make it less of a no-brainer. * I don't know how to define "better".
        mseebach 11y ago
        You can burn it cleanly, at sufficiently high temperatures. In the nordic countries, this heat is then going into city-wide central heating networks, meaning it substitutes natural gas or electricity for domestic heating.
        Kluny 11y ago
        There's still going to be emissions though, right? What are the emissions? Just steam and CO2?
        AjithAntony 11y ago
        > sufficiently high temperatures Can you fuel such a fire with only the trash? Or do we need to supplement with other fossil fuels?
        delazeur 11y ago
        A combination of high temperature, gas residence time, and various scrubbing technologies can more or less solve the toxic emissions problem from incinerators. On the other hand, landfills will emit huge amounts of methane for decades, and at this point relatively few landfills are equipped to collect this gas. From a strictly air quality-focused perspective (my professional area), I would say incinerators are usually better. I would guess that incinerators are also preferable from a soil and water quality perspective, but I can't say for sure.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    An awful lot of pulp wood comes out of managed woodlands. I'm not sure it is very comparable to growing a crop. The timescales for harvest are 30 and 40 years, and it's land that people think of as forests, not as plantations. (there are certainly tree plantations that are very comparable to growing crops, it's just not the only source for pulp)
    - douche 11y ago
      It's only 30-40 years if you go in and flatten it. Even in the northeast, as cold as it is, you can cut over the same piece of woods every 5-10 years, if you're the tiniest bit selective about it. In the South, they have tree farms growing fast-growth eucalyptus hybrids that they can turn over even faster.
  - mturmon 11y ago
    According to TFA, for household recycling, aluminum and cardboard are the most valuable. Also according to TFA, the economics for plastic (as it's currently priced, externalities not included, blah blah) are not as favorable. So TFA taught me to be less skeptical about cardboard recycling.
  - zanny 11y ago
    I live in a municipality that does not recycle aluminum or any other metal at all. They only take plastic, glass, and paper.
    - AjithAntony 11y ago
      Yeah, that is strange. The opposite of the expected outcome for an economically rational recycling operation.
- shoover 11y ago
  I wouldn't mind at all if the municipal recycling program took my recycling, sorted it, and routed the less valuable materials straight to the landfill based on current market conditions and analysis of all the criteria mentioned in the OP (cost of new materials, cost to recycle, carbon footprint, etc.). I put it out in one unsorted cart regardless and they have to sort it either way. It has crossed my mind that they may already do this, either on the sly or per a policy in some terms I haven't read. If they had more flexibility with the economics, maybe they could stop charging residents $6/month (the fee in my city for recycling pickup) to feel like we're doing the right thing.
ranko 11y ago
There's a reason that "recycle" comes last in the "reduce, reuse, recycle" catchphrase. There's a frightening amount of food, for example, that could simply not be wasted at all.
- cmrx64 11y ago
  Came here to drop this comment -- it's so often ignored!
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  There needs to be another word in that mantra: "repair".
  - pkaye 11y ago
    Except that repair costs be too much in many cases (ie the replacement part or the labor cost) that it is cheaper to buy a new product for just a little more.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Which ignores the waste disposal externality and alternative uses of the resources used for replacement. The whole point of the slogan is to address the fact that being wasteful has costs that you don't see up front. Besides that, the manufacturer has an intrinsic incentive to encourage people to throw away something only 1% broken to buy a 100% new replacement. Do you think Apple must glue the batteries inside the unopenable iPhone case, when other manufacturers have user-replaceable battery packs?
      - cgriswald 11y ago
        > Which ignores the waste disposal externality and alternative uses of the resources used for replacement. The whole point of the slogan is to address the fact that being wasteful has costs that you don't see up front. It is a rare person who will pay >100% to repair a broken device rather than pay 100% to replace it with a newer, possibly superior product in order to avoid the (more or less abstract in our minds, despite being very real) cost of all the externalities of that decision.
marvel_boy 11y ago
I do not disagree with the final conclusion or at least statement of this article, “The ultimate solution, … is better design of products and packaging further upstream to plan better for end of life and avoid the waste issue altogether.”
- progrocks9 11y ago
  Packaging is the problem. We should only use goods that can be recharged or refilled. Otherwise, the problem goes on and on.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Recycling sucks. You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels, or else it won't be (expensively) collected. You can also go drop it off yourself, but you have to pay for the pleasure, and own or rent a vehicle. Even after all of that, a majority of what is supposed to be recycled ends up being "recycled" into electricity, by an incinerator. That's the case in this neck of the woods, at any rate. Recycling treats a symptom, not a disease. We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence, and we dispose of things that could be yet used for a long time to come. A better solution would be to impose the cost of disposal on manufacturers - this already happens to a degree with WEEE, but try actually getting a manufacturer to collect - it's made deliberately difficult as they'd rather you just fly-tip and save them the expense - even though you paid for that service as part of your purchase. Another better solution would be to pass goods on whole for re-use rather than recycling wherever possible, which has gained some traction through things like freecycle and eBay, but is still a minority case. This behaviour could be encouraged by governments, but is instead actively discouraged, as it hurts sales of new goods, and therefore tax revenues. As per usual, we'll only change when forced to - by which point it'll be too late. People will use 300 year old toasters in the future, and weep for our wastefulnes. I do what I can, buy very little new (all of my furniture is pre 1960), dumpster dive, pass things I no longer want or need on, but it's still not enough.
- pizza234 11y ago
  Disposal is not so complicated in all the countries. In some you have much looser rules, eg. no labels removal, and [directly] paid collection. While it's true that solving the causes is radically more effective than treating the symptoms, in the isolated view of the garbage recycling, separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    > separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection. Why would this be true? I would think that a worker after collection would be 10x more efficient and precise when separating recyclables then individuals doing it piecemeal. The consumer is certainly paid less than a employee to do that job badly (in comparison), but there's no way that the extra taxes that I would have to pay to have recyclables sorted centrally would be higher than value of the time it takes to sort it myself.
nprecup 11y ago
Interesting article. It focused on economics, but didn't really factor in the environmental effects of landfilling or recycling. I wonder how that impacts the economic assessment. Still, generating less waste in the first place is always a good goal. I like the thought of shifting responsibility of recycling to the manufacturer. It would encourage less use of wasteful materials that have little recycling value.
- astrocat 11y ago
  It seems like we could achieve the economic goals mentioned in the article and avoid the pitfalls of plastic in the environment by simply getting over our dislike of waste incineration. Modern incinerators are quite wonderful things, but need careful management of a couple waste byproducts. I was pleasantly surprised at the comprehensiveness of the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration
- titzer 11y ago
  I am skeptical of pretty much all analyses of recycling and environmentalism that start from a primarily economic angle. The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place. The market supports overproduction, overpackaging and oversupply. All of those are economic activity that is marked in the "good" column by governments and societies. Ultimately, lowering the production of a good used by people is a reduction in economic activity. Reduce, reuse, and recycle means less economic activity, but not less wealth. Until we realize this, we are destined to pursue policies that are bad for the environment and waste resources.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    It really depends on how long or short sighted the economic rational wants to be. If you include the cost of pollution, including people's desire to live without pollution and the cost to reduce it to acceptable levels for people, then economics encompasses everything needed to correctly assess a scenario (but whether we can correctly create and interpret the model is a much more dicey). Edit: > The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place. Yes, costs of pollution were (are?) not being correctly applied to those creating the pollution. That's not a failure of economics, it's a failure of people to correctly account all the economic factors that exists.
henrikschroder 11y ago
The part about plastics being useless to recycle actually makes a lot of sense, if you live in a place where trash is incinerated for electricity or heat, and you have oil-powered electricity. Making virgin plastic from the oil you saved by burning plastic trash in its stead is better/cheaper/more energy fficient than recycling the plastic trash. Aluminium is always extremely cost-effective to recycle, because making aluminium from bauxite requires enormous amounts of electricity, but re-smelting aluminium containers is cheap. I'm surprised that glass was not cost-effective to recycle according to the article. I thought that since it's generally easy to sort and re-smelt, it's be all good. But maybe the raw materials are so cheap that it outweighs the cost of recycling?
- Terribledactyl 11y ago
  Traveling through Germany, any grocer I bought a glass bottle from required a deposit that was returned when the bottle was. Shipped back to original producer, then cleaned and refiled.
- DougWebb 11y ago
  I'm no expert, but I think glass has a lot of additives that impact its reuse. Colors for sure, but also strength, clarity, thermal conductivity, and maybe more. But for glass bottles specifically, if people got over being sensitive to the bottle color (both consumers and brand-conscious producers) it would probably be ok to lump the bottles together.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    Where I live, glass is collected in three bins, labeled "white glass", "green glass", and "brown glass". The classic question is "What about blue glass?" As it turns out, all oddly-colored glass should go into the white glass bin since the recycling processes for green and brown glass are tuned for the specific dyes used.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- delazeur 11y ago
hackuser 11y ago
Does anyone know about the relative trade-offs of composting and recycling? Many of the trendier environmentally-aware people I see around me seem to prefer composting, including compostable disposable cups, etc. But it's not clear to me that composting would be better. What is the chemical composition of this compost of somewhat random materials? Is it safe? Is there waste? Is it usable as quality compost? Does it get used? How much demand is there? etc.
- rwmj 11y ago
  You also need to look at fuel costs of transportation. I compost all my food waste, and use the compost to grow vegetables. The council could also take my food waste, but the nearest municipal composter is apparently about 20 miles away.
- frankus 11y ago
  One big advantage to composting is that little bits of food clinging to the container are a feature, not a bug. So it saves a lot of water and (if hot water is needed) energy over washing and recycling paper or (with PLA and such) plastic. The composting facilities I'm aware of are for-profit, but they typically get paid at both ends of the business (http://cedar-grove.com/about-us/faq/ http://cedar-grove.com/about-us/faq/).
fiatjaf 11y ago
Why not consume less?
- static_noise 11y ago
  Because of the debt spiral induced imperative of growth.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
I honestly feel recycling is wasted effort. It's largely a way of buying off our existential terror with publicly visible pious busywork. Rubbish which actually makes it to landfill, as a problem, is not the big one or even in the big few. Rubbish that does not, which ends up as polluting litter or in the sea, is a larger problem but one recycling completely doesn't address. So far as I'm concerned, what a landfill is, is a resource mine we don't yet have the technology or desire to exploit. A bit of futuristic technology, and we could be disassembling it for gold, iron, rare earths, hydrocarbons, etc. It's not gone, but it's put aside. And putting things aside can be fine if you come back for them.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
I did a thorough economic analysis of littering and discovered that just dropping my crap on the street, at the beach or in the park was far less effort and time than carrying it to the nearest trash can. A libertarian friend pointed out that if there was economic value to not littering then someone would already be paying to take my trash from my hand as I drop it. So now I can litter with a clear conscience, as I've proved its better to do so.
cat-dev-null 11y ago
FWIW, Stanford both does recycling (usually 4 or 5 cans in Tresidder [0]) and post-consumer separates trash into recyclable materials. Judging from the typical Tragedy of the Commons recyclable contamination disaster at places like Costco, perhaps relying on consumers to put things in the right place is a fool's errand... robotic with human automation at refuse processing points probably is a more efficient way to centralize and drive down the net cost of recycling with scale. 0: http://bgm.stanford.edu/pssi_flyers http://bgm.stanford.edu/pssi_flyers
dreamlayers 11y ago
Why is recycling almost a religious issue for some people? How has reduce, reuse, recycle been turned into just recycle? Some people even talk about reuse and incorrectly call it recycling. It seems as if many people have been brainwashed via propaganda about recycling. How did that happen?
- specialist 11y ago
  Speaking for myself: Waste is immoral. I blame my Presbyterian upbringing, W. Edwards Deming, my 4th grade teacher, and Peter Drucker for the washing of my brain.
qewrffewqwfqew 11y ago
Container deposit schemes are getting some discussion in the comments, so it seems an apt time to mention their history in Australia [1]. SA has had the scheme since '77, and the NT managed to introduce it - then reintroduce it - just in 2013. No other state presently has such a scheme. The most disturbing part is what happened in NT. The proposed scheme - which had massive community support - was challenged by beverage manufacturers - Coca Cola, Schweppes and Lion - based on some very dubious claims about it being an expensive and ineffective way to recycle. In other states it has been a political football: parties support the idea when campaigning, then promptly forget about it once in government. The paranoid part of my brain wonders about behind-the-scenes influence of donors on this pattern. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_... As a side point, in Asia I'm used to experiencing that a beverage bought in a platic bottle must be consumed on premises, so the bottle can be immediately put in a container for collection. That's a lot more satisfying than having to look for a bin because I got thirsty.
- specialist 11y ago
  beverage bought in a plastic bottle must be consumed on premises Interesting. Beverage waste is huge. My locale recycles aggressively. Including a separate waste stream for compost (for better or worse). Seeking to further reduce their waste stream, my local university assessed what's what. Something like 50% of the waste by weight is fluids. From sodas, lattes, etc. Since attending that talk, I was trying to imagine a trashbin that would puncture beverage containers, letting the fluid drain out the bottom. I like your (Asian on premises) solution better.
dankohn1 11y ago
This piece recycles (sorry) the prophetic arguments from this classic 1996 article by John Tierney, which generated more reader response than the NY Times had then ever received: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garb...
- majewsky 11y ago
  Business idea: A weekly newspaper or website that just republishes decade-long articles that were prophetic at the time and are still valid today.
robbiep 11y ago
So this guy criticises recycling by creating an economic model that fails to take into consideration externalities of product consumption and discard. Not a very useful model and we would do well to not pay it much heed
dclowd9901 11y ago
I would really like to see a longterm container pipeline. In true recycling, we wouldn't have any plastic containers, period. Everything should be served with, on or in durable, lasting materials, or easily recycled post compost paper. We just don't have an accommodating container infrastructure to manage that, but what if I could take a cup from Starbucks and when I'm finished with it, put it in a recycling bin, it goes to a center for sanitization, then is redistributed to McDonald's? It would be like how a hotel works, but on the scale of a city.

117 points by nkurz 11y ago

danielweber 11y ago

Recycling imposes a cost on me. I would like to know which parts of it are really worth doing and which are not.

SteveNuts 11y ago
I really only worry about recycling metal. Soda, canned goods, that sort of thing. I've been a bit skeptical of recycling paper since I started recycling, the trees used for paper are plentiful, and are grown as a crop. Plus, as far as I can understand all the same processes that it takes to make paper from tree pulp are also used when recycling paper, so that seems like a neutral process at best. Plastic I try to reuse whenever possible.
- coldpie 11y ago
  One other benefit to recycling other than reducing new material usage is keeping stuff out of landfills. Landfills are anaerobic, which means most bacteria that breaks stuff down can't live in them, so things break down extremely slowly[1]. That slow breakdown means we need more space for landfills, which are toxic environments. So even if the recycling process is neutral, or even somewhat more costly than producing new material, keeping stuff out of landfills is another benefit that you might not have considered in your calculation. In addition, cities with recycling programs can actually sell the material they gather back to companies, literally turning garbage into money and creating a revenue source for the city[2,3]. One important component in this is that the cities can get a higher price for higher quality recycling streams, where the output is all composed of one type of material. This is why, even though St Paul is now single-sort, I still separate my paper from the other recycling. It helps keep the paper higher quality by avoiding getting it dirty and wet, and costs me no real effort. [1] http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.ht... [2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-an-off-again-on-again-love-affair/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a... [3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-high-tech-materials-science-with-economics-that-work/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-...
  - henrikschroder 11y ago
    I'm from a place where less than one percent of all household waste ends up in a landfill, so moving to the US and learning that most of my trash actually just goes on a dump somewhere was quite a shock to me. So why doesn't the US have more trash incinerators? It seems like such a no-brainer to me if you care about the environment?
    - coldpie 11y ago
      Is burning trash better* than a landfill? Honestly asking, I don't know and this is something I'd love to be better educated about. Seems like you'd have lots of toxic fumes from burning, which may make it less of a no-brainer. * I don't know how to define "better".
      - mseebach 11y ago
        You can burn it cleanly, at sufficiently high temperatures. In the nordic countries, this heat is then going into city-wide central heating networks, meaning it substitutes natural gas or electricity for domestic heating.
        Kluny 11y ago
        There's still going to be emissions though, right? What are the emissions? Just steam and CO2?
        AjithAntony 11y ago
        > sufficiently high temperatures Can you fuel such a fire with only the trash? Or do we need to supplement with other fossil fuels?
      - delazeur 11y ago
        A combination of high temperature, gas residence time, and various scrubbing technologies can more or less solve the toxic emissions problem from incinerators. On the other hand, landfills will emit huge amounts of methane for decades, and at this point relatively few landfills are equipped to collect this gas. From a strictly air quality-focused perspective (my professional area), I would say incinerators are usually better. I would guess that incinerators are also preferable from a soil and water quality perspective, but I can't say for sure.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  An awful lot of pulp wood comes out of managed woodlands. I'm not sure it is very comparable to growing a crop. The timescales for harvest are 30 and 40 years, and it's land that people think of as forests, not as plantations. (there are certainly tree plantations that are very comparable to growing crops, it's just not the only source for pulp)
  - douche 11y ago
    It's only 30-40 years if you go in and flatten it. Even in the northeast, as cold as it is, you can cut over the same piece of woods every 5-10 years, if you're the tiniest bit selective about it. In the South, they have tree farms growing fast-growth eucalyptus hybrids that they can turn over even faster.
- mturmon 11y ago
  According to TFA, for household recycling, aluminum and cardboard are the most valuable. Also according to TFA, the economics for plastic (as it's currently priced, externalities not included, blah blah) are not as favorable. So TFA taught me to be less skeptical about cardboard recycling.
- zanny 11y ago
  I live in a municipality that does not recycle aluminum or any other metal at all. They only take plastic, glass, and paper.
  - AjithAntony 11y ago
    Yeah, that is strange. The opposite of the expected outcome for an economically rational recycling operation.
shoover 11y ago
I wouldn't mind at all if the municipal recycling program took my recycling, sorted it, and routed the less valuable materials straight to the landfill based on current market conditions and analysis of all the criteria mentioned in the OP (cost of new materials, cost to recycle, carbon footprint, etc.). I put it out in one unsorted cart regardless and they have to sort it either way. It has crossed my mind that they may already do this, either on the sly or per a policy in some terms I haven't read. If they had more flexibility with the economics, maybe they could stop charging residents $6/month (the fee in my city for recycling pickup) to feel like we're doing the right thing.

ranko 11y ago

There's a reason that "recycle" comes last in the "reduce, reuse, recycle" catchphrase. There's a frightening amount of food, for example, that could simply not be wasted at all.

cmrx64 11y ago
Came here to drop this comment -- it's so often ignored!
logfromblammo 11y ago
There needs to be another word in that mantra: "repair".
- pkaye 11y ago
  Except that repair costs be too much in many cases (ie the replacement part or the labor cost) that it is cheaper to buy a new product for just a little more.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Which ignores the waste disposal externality and alternative uses of the resources used for replacement. The whole point of the slogan is to address the fact that being wasteful has costs that you don't see up front. Besides that, the manufacturer has an intrinsic incentive to encourage people to throw away something only 1% broken to buy a 100% new replacement. Do you think Apple must glue the batteries inside the unopenable iPhone case, when other manufacturers have user-replaceable battery packs?
    - cgriswald 11y ago
      > Which ignores the waste disposal externality and alternative uses of the resources used for replacement. The whole point of the slogan is to address the fact that being wasteful has costs that you don't see up front. It is a rare person who will pay >100% to repair a broken device rather than pay 100% to replace it with a newer, possibly superior product in order to avoid the (more or less abstract in our minds, despite being very real) cost of all the externalities of that decision.

marvel_boy 11y ago

I do not disagree with the final conclusion or at least statement of this article, “The ultimate solution, … is better design of products and packaging further upstream to plan better for end of life and avoid the waste issue altogether.”

progrocks9 11y ago
Packaging is the problem. We should only use goods that can be recharged or refilled. Otherwise, the problem goes on and on.

madaxe_again 11y ago

Recycling sucks. You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels, or else it won't be (expensively) collected. You can also go drop it off yourself, but you have to pay for the pleasure, and own or rent a vehicle. Even after all of that, a majority of what is supposed to be recycled ends up being "recycled" into electricity, by an incinerator. That's the case in this neck of the woods, at any rate. Recycling treats a symptom, not a disease. We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence, and we dispose of things that could be yet used for a long time to come. A better solution would be to impose the cost of disposal on manufacturers - this already happens to a degree with WEEE, but try actually getting a manufacturer to collect - it's made deliberately difficult as they'd rather you just fly-tip and save them the expense - even though you paid for that service as part of your purchase. Another better solution would be to pass goods on whole for re-use rather than recycling wherever possible, which has gained some traction through things like freecycle and eBay, but is still a minority case. This behaviour could be encouraged by governments, but is instead actively discouraged, as it hurts sales of new goods, and therefore tax revenues. As per usual, we'll only change when forced to - by which point it'll be too late. People will use 300 year old toasters in the future, and weep for our wastefulnes. I do what I can, buy very little new (all of my furniture is pre 1960), dumpster dive, pass things I no longer want or need on, but it's still not enough.

pizza234 11y ago
Disposal is not so complicated in all the countries. In some you have much looser rules, eg. no labels removal, and [directly] paid collection. While it's true that solving the causes is radically more effective than treating the symptoms, in the isolated view of the garbage recycling, separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  > separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection. Why would this be true? I would think that a worker after collection would be 10x more efficient and precise when separating recyclables then individuals doing it piecemeal. The consumer is certainly paid less than a employee to do that job badly (in comparison), but there's no way that the extra taxes that I would have to pay to have recyclables sorted centrally would be higher than value of the time it takes to sort it myself.

nprecup 11y ago

Interesting article. It focused on economics, but didn't really factor in the environmental effects of landfilling or recycling. I wonder how that impacts the economic assessment. Still, generating less waste in the first place is always a good goal. I like the thought of shifting responsibility of recycling to the manufacturer. It would encourage less use of wasteful materials that have little recycling value.

astrocat 11y ago
It seems like we could achieve the economic goals mentioned in the article and avoid the pitfalls of plastic in the environment by simply getting over our dislike of waste incineration. Modern incinerators are quite wonderful things, but need careful management of a couple waste byproducts. I was pleasantly surprised at the comprehensiveness of the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration
titzer 11y ago
I am skeptical of pretty much all analyses of recycling and environmentalism that start from a primarily economic angle. The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place. The market supports overproduction, overpackaging and oversupply. All of those are economic activity that is marked in the "good" column by governments and societies. Ultimately, lowering the production of a good used by people is a reduction in economic activity. Reduce, reuse, and recycle means less economic activity, but not less wealth. Until we realize this, we are destined to pursue policies that are bad for the environment and waste resources.
- kbenson 11y ago
  It really depends on how long or short sighted the economic rational wants to be. If you include the cost of pollution, including people's desire to live without pollution and the cost to reduce it to acceptable levels for people, then economics encompasses everything needed to correctly assess a scenario (but whether we can correctly create and interpret the model is a much more dicey). Edit: > The main problem being is that (obviously!) economic forces have driven us into the situation in the first place. Yes, costs of pollution were (are?) not being correctly applied to those creating the pollution. That's not a failure of economics, it's a failure of people to correctly account all the economic factors that exists.

henrikschroder 11y ago

The part about plastics being useless to recycle actually makes a lot of sense, if you live in a place where trash is incinerated for electricity or heat, and you have oil-powered electricity. Making virgin plastic from the oil you saved by burning plastic trash in its stead is better/cheaper/more energy fficient than recycling the plastic trash. Aluminium is always extremely cost-effective to recycle, because making aluminium from bauxite requires enormous amounts of electricity, but re-smelting aluminium containers is cheap. I'm surprised that glass was not cost-effective to recycle according to the article. I thought that since it's generally easy to sort and re-smelt, it's be all good. But maybe the raw materials are so cheap that it outweighs the cost of recycling?

Terribledactyl 11y ago
Traveling through Germany, any grocer I bought a glass bottle from required a deposit that was returned when the bottle was. Shipped back to original producer, then cleaned and refiled.
DougWebb 11y ago
I'm no expert, but I think glass has a lot of additives that impact its reuse. Colors for sure, but also strength, clarity, thermal conductivity, and maybe more. But for glass bottles specifically, if people got over being sensitive to the bottle color (both consumers and brand-conscious producers) it would probably be ok to lump the bottles together.
- majewsky 11y ago
  Where I live, glass is collected in three bins, labeled "white glass", "green glass", and "brown glass". The classic question is "What about blue glass?" As it turns out, all oddly-colored glass should go into the white glass bin since the recycling processes for green and brown glass are tuned for the specific dyes used.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
delazeur 11y ago

hackuser 11y ago

Does anyone know about the relative trade-offs of composting and recycling? Many of the trendier environmentally-aware people I see around me seem to prefer composting, including compostable disposable cups, etc. But it's not clear to me that composting would be better. What is the chemical composition of this compost of somewhat random materials? Is it safe? Is there waste? Is it usable as quality compost? Does it get used? How much demand is there? etc.

rwmj 11y ago
You also need to look at fuel costs of transportation. I compost all my food waste, and use the compost to grow vegetables. The council could also take my food waste, but the nearest municipal composter is apparently about 20 miles away.
frankus 11y ago
One big advantage to composting is that little bits of food clinging to the container are a feature, not a bug. So it saves a lot of water and (if hot water is needed) energy over washing and recycling paper or (with PLA and such) plastic. The composting facilities I'm aware of are for-profit, but they typically get paid at both ends of the business (http://cedar-grove.com/about-us/faq/ http://cedar-grove.com/about-us/faq/).

fiatjaf 11y ago

Why not consume less?

static_noise 11y ago
Because of the debt spiral induced imperative of growth.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

I honestly feel recycling is wasted effort. It's largely a way of buying off our existential terror with publicly visible pious busywork. Rubbish which actually makes it to landfill, as a problem, is not the big one or even in the big few. Rubbish that does not, which ends up as polluting litter or in the sea, is a larger problem but one recycling completely doesn't address. So far as I'm concerned, what a landfill is, is a resource mine we don't yet have the technology or desire to exploit. A bit of futuristic technology, and we could be disassembling it for gold, iron, rare earths, hydrocarbons, etc. It's not gone, but it's put aside. And putting things aside can be fine if you come back for them.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

I did a thorough economic analysis of littering and discovered that just dropping my crap on the street, at the beach or in the park was far less effort and time than carrying it to the nearest trash can. A libertarian friend pointed out that if there was economic value to not littering then someone would already be paying to take my trash from my hand as I drop it. So now I can litter with a clear conscience, as I've proved its better to do so.

cat-dev-null 11y ago

FWIW, Stanford both does recycling (usually 4 or 5 cans in Tresidder [0]) and post-consumer separates trash into recyclable materials. Judging from the typical Tragedy of the Commons recyclable contamination disaster at places like Costco, perhaps relying on consumers to put things in the right place is a fool's errand... robotic with human automation at refuse processing points probably is a more efficient way to centralize and drive down the net cost of recycling with scale. 0: http://bgm.stanford.edu/pssi_flyers http://bgm.stanford.edu/pssi_flyers

dreamlayers 11y ago

Why is recycling almost a religious issue for some people? How has reduce, reuse, recycle been turned into just recycle? Some people even talk about reuse and incorrectly call it recycling. It seems as if many people have been brainwashed via propaganda about recycling. How did that happen?

specialist 11y ago
Speaking for myself: Waste is immoral. I blame my Presbyterian upbringing, W. Edwards Deming, my 4th grade teacher, and Peter Drucker for the washing of my brain.

qewrffewqwfqew 11y ago

Container deposit schemes are getting some discussion in the comments, so it seems an apt time to mention their history in Australia [1]. SA has had the scheme since '77, and the NT managed to introduce it - then reintroduce it - just in 2013. No other state presently has such a scheme. The most disturbing part is what happened in NT. The proposed scheme - which had massive community support - was challenged by beverage manufacturers - Coca Cola, Schweppes and Lion - based on some very dubious claims about it being an expensive and ineffective way to recycle. In other states it has been a political football: parties support the idea when campaigning, then promptly forget about it once in government. The paranoid part of my brain wonders about behind-the-scenes influence of donors on this pattern. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation_... As a side point, in Asia I'm used to experiencing that a beverage bought in a platic bottle must be consumed on premises, so the bottle can be immediately put in a container for collection. That's a lot more satisfying than having to look for a bin because I got thirsty.

specialist 11y ago
beverage bought in a plastic bottle must be consumed on premises Interesting. Beverage waste is huge. My locale recycles aggressively. Including a separate waste stream for compost (for better or worse). Seeking to further reduce their waste stream, my local university assessed what's what. Something like 50% of the waste by weight is fluids. From sodas, lattes, etc. Since attending that talk, I was trying to imagine a trashbin that would puncture beverage containers, letting the fluid drain out the bottom. I like your (Asian on premises) solution better.

dankohn1 11y ago

This piece recycles (sorry) the prophetic arguments from this classic 1996 article by John Tierney, which generated more reader response than the NY Times had then ever received: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garb...

majewsky 11y ago
Business idea: A weekly newspaper or website that just republishes decade-long articles that were prophetic at the time and are still valid today.

robbiep 11y ago

So this guy criticises recycling by creating an economic model that fails to take into consideration externalities of product consumption and discard. Not a very useful model and we would do well to not pay it much heed

dclowd9901 11y ago

I would really like to see a longterm container pipeline. In true recycling, we wouldn't have any plastic containers, period. Everything should be served with, on or in durable, lasting materials, or easily recycled post compost paper. We just don't have an accommodating container infrastructure to manage that, but what if I could take a cup from Starbucks and when I'm finished with it, put it in a recycling bin, it goes to a center for sanitization, then is redistributed to McDonald's? It would be like how a hotel works, but on the scale of a city.