5 ms·

Drowning in Garbage

54 points by aagha 9y ago

bob_theslob646 9y ago
I really appreciate the authors of this post for their effort in raising awareness but I think it will fall on deaf ears. A few things that they mentioned that they didn't go into crazy depth are origination of plastic(s), transportation costs of waste, and taxation as a policy to reduce waste. Did you know that glass is reusable, unfortunately it's so heavy that it's worth nothing to recycle. The other problem is where the funding for recycling goes. In the New York City metro area, a bottle deposit tax is used towards education. If everyone recycles, where/how is the government going to plug that hole, however small it may be? The better question that the author should be asking is what type of policy(s) should be implemented in order to make it so that people want to or are forced to reuse verses to not even think about throwing things out. The only conclusion that I see is a super high tax. Unfortunately,most people don't really care unless it hits them in the wallet. You would be suprised. You could make the fines incredibly high or jail people like they do in Singapore. If Singapore can do it, why can't New York City?
- Spooky23 9y ago
  I think the failure to reuse glass is a failure of imagination. Why not have consumers refill product? Get your shampoo refilled at a machine in the aisle. Tax the plastic bottle.
  - wincy 9y ago
    You would have to make it punitively expensive for that to sway me. I pay $10 for a giant bottle of shampoo from Costco, if it suddenly became $10 + $5 plastic bottle tax I'd probably still just pay the $15 rather than refill the bottle.
    - opportune 9y ago
      I'd wager the same would not be true if that $5 saved after income tax represented 30 minutes or more of work on the job. Sure you might not refill the bottle but empty reusable bottle sowed become more common/affordable everywhere, and plenty of poorer people would definitely recycle. You're just a single person, if you're talking about policy you need to look at the total impact
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      The evidence is overwhelmingly against you[1], given how the plastic bag tax in Ireland and now the UK has shown it does significantly increase reuse, even for nominal amounts like a 5p charge per bag. You might not want to save money, but most consumers do. You're falling into the trap of "everyone is exactly like me", where you're in fact the exception, not the norm. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...
      - esrauch 9y ago
        I think bags are quite different: the hassle of reusable bags is really low, they weigh almost nothing, and they have other real advantages over the plastic bags (they don't break). Many US states have bottle deposits for a similar "nominal" amount per bottle and the majority of people don't do it: when I was a broke college student some friends and I did it for a little while but the math really didn't work out even then.
        Spooky23 9y ago
        Bottle deposits are very effective. Aluminum soda cans have a 60% recycling rate vs 30% for most other materials.
        mattmanser 9y ago
        My Aunt & Uncle and in Holland did it all the time and as far as I could tell everyone did it (I'm from UK, we don't have a scheme like that). In this article after a very quick google they report a 90% return rate in Holland (I'm not going to spend time digging into where the 90% comes from): http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 So it might be a cultural thing or it may be the deposit figure is too low. As far as I remember in Holland it was 10 cents when I was a kid in the 90s, which would be about a dime per bottle.
        esrauch 9y ago
        It certainly is cultural: in Switzerland the rate of recycling is extremely high without and deposit. To clarify, in my experience what happens in the US is most people recycle bottles at curbside pickup, rather than drive somewhere to get 5 cents per can. In cities homeless tend to go around and collect all of the cans from the curb and redeem them.
    - kaybe 9y ago
      Where there is a bottle tax poor people collecting and returning the bottles soon emerge. As long as you leave it somewhere accessible, someone will come and return it, especially for $5.
    - Scoundreller 9y ago
      The giant bottles require less packaging material per unit of volume, so you’re already making a better choice.
  - yostrovs 9y ago
    Lack of creativity, and often bad reasons, inevitably result in taxation as a way to get people to behave how you'd like. Punish, punish, punish and maybe they'll learn something.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    Because your health is generally safer when we don't. Got MSRA on your throwaway plastic bottle, no problem it's going to the dump. Got MSRA on your refillable bottle? Better steam clean it first or peoples heads might start falling off.
- ams6110 9y ago
  A high tax on garbage will only incent illegal disposal. Dumping stuff in ravines, on other people's property, etc.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvdkhlng 9y ago
    Not necessarily, you could tax the production/sale of goods that usually contribute to garbage. For example in Germany, it's mostly the producers of goods who have to pay for disposal of corresponding (packaging) waste, thereby creating an incentive to reduce packaging or rely on reusable bins etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual_system_of_waste_collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual...
    - Roodgorf 9y ago
      I agree. Placing a greater burden on the side of the producers to deal with the trash they produce seems like the most logical approach to me. If X company wants to make something with a bunch of plastic packaging they will have to pay for the impact that will have. If they want that to eat into their profits, fine, but I think the more likely scenario is that that they will pass as much of that cost on to consumers as they can, ideally also driving down demand for those products.
jimrandomh 9y ago
Looking at the numbers, I just don't see a real problem here. Landfill is three dimensional, and can be built on top of; it would take quite a lot of orders of magnitude population growth before we started running low on places to put it.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  Landfills emit gases and things collapse as the waste changes over time. They aren't perfect foundations for future construction.
thisisit 9y ago
Unrelated but the scrolling on site is super weird. Clicking on Lagos takes to the top of the page.
- gumby 9y ago
  Not really unrelated — if the article is hard to read it’s a problem. And what’s with the scrolling that sends small “fortune cookie” messages scrolling across the photos? That all simply distracts from the article and makes you have to find your place again. Sad.
rabboRubble 9y ago
For anybody interested in the totality of their garbage output, I can't recommend this book enough: https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Land-Secret-Trail-Trash/dp/031615461X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1 https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Land-Secret-Trail-Trash/dp/03...? I had my book club read this book, and so many times, for so many other books this books came up in conversation. Interesting facts: * Glass is recycled in order to grind it up and spread it over landfills to keep down dust. In this way the glass is counted as recycled and not garbage despite it ended up being in the dump. * Roman era landfills are still leaking effluant. * Plastics might be marked and marketed as recyclable but many plastics are better off as garbage. Better yet, never created and used in the first place. * Whenever a natural compost toilet has a problem, more sawdust is almost always the answer to fixing whatever ails it. (Not really in the book, one of our bookclub members had hippie parents). I would follow up this book with another set in Mumbai: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067553/ref=as_li_ss_tl https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067553/ref=as_li_ss_tl Somehow we need to do a better job at reducing poverty and imroving consumer recycling habits. No miracle solutions in this book. Just griding, abject poverty, living in the garbage of Mumbai.
tmnvix 9y ago
In our moral crusade against impending environmental disaster, it astounds me that packaging is still given little thought beyond what we should do with it once we already have it. I think it would be a good idea to place some kind of rating on packaging to encourage purchasers to be more cognisant of what they are actually taking responsibility for beyond just the contents. I can't help but feel like we are going backwards here - especially when I see things like individual bananas being sold on trays[1]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/WPaVBTv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WPaVBTv.jpg
- titzer 9y ago
  In Germany consumers are legally allowed to unpackage items directly in the store and the store is required to handle the leftover packaging.
  - ndh2 9y ago
    Very few people do that, though. Certainly not enough for the stores to do anything about packaging.
gumby 9y ago
> Is this just garbage, or is it a resource? About 10 years ago I looked at using engineered extremophile bacteria to mine metals from dumps. The tech was complex but doable even then and there were other things we could have done too in terms of remediation. What killed it? Local government. They pay to manage and maintain dumps. I offered to take over their “brownfield” sites and change their cost center into a revenue stream. Everyone I talked to thought it would be a great idea...but wanted so much in royalties that it would not be worth doing. They’d rather strangle the goose.
- gregw134 9y ago
  Could you give us an idea of how that could work? I can't even begin to imagine how that could be done.
  - gumby 9y ago
    Briefly: 1: grind up the middens (sorry archeologists!) 2: put the resulting slurry in a bioreactor (an open tank would work) with your bacteria and stir for a while 3: rinse and drain tank. Spin down the rinsate. 4. Profit!
- YokoZar 9y ago
  Why not buy out a local dump and run it "cheaper" then, under the existing contracts?
  - gumby 9y ago
    Good question. To start with we only wanted "full" dumps (ones that had been closed) rather than having to deal with the operation of a dump as well. There are numerous landfill sites that have been covered with dirt and now have to be looked after. Also there's a higher level of valuable waste in the old dumps, though that wasn't a major factor.
nicolas_t 9y ago
> On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much That surprised me with the quantity of garbage due to overpacking in Japan, I'd have expected more. For example, I just bought 2 salads to eat at home, each salad is in a plastic container with some ice sticked to it and enveloped separately in a plastic bag. Then those two salads are in a plastic bag. It's an amazing amount of waste for no real reason.
- Joe-Z 9y ago
  Plastic bags don't really weigh that much. Maybe Americans use a little less plastic bags (do they, though?) but throw away more other stuff, like plastic gadget crap.
  - titzer 9y ago
    Having personally dug hundreds, perhaps thousands of those evil little fuckers out of the sands of beaches all over the world, I would say that gram for gram these are one of the worst kinds of pollution man has created. Plastic shopping bags are a real bitch when they get into the sand. They often fill up with sand and become like a 10kg buried beachball. One literally needs to dig completely under them to get them out without tearing them up and leaving part of the bag under the sand. All of those plastic bags basically glue together the beach so that the normal erosive action of the sand being moved around by tides and waves no longer grinds things up like it normally would. That means the whole beach gets stagnant and rotten like a swamp. Really nasty.
    - Joe-Z 9y ago
      Oh sure, I despise the ubiquitous hand-outs of plastic bags as much as anyone, I was just making that comment to give a reason for the weight-difference in spite of the perceived over-usage of packaging in Japan. I make it a point to refuse plastic bags whenever possible (which is pretty much always). I find it incredible that they are still considered the standard mode for packaging your shit. If shops would only give them out when asked for it, the number of used plastic bags would surely plummet. One anecdote I found amusing is when I was in Yosemite: I bought a couple of t-shirts and told the lady at the check-out she doesn't need to give me a plastic bag for them, since I have my backpack with me anyways. She was pleasantly surprised and thanked me. It's one of the most well-known national parks in the US, where they make it a point to educate people on taking care of your environment, yet they hand out plastic bags with every purchase in the souvenir shop.
artur_makly 9y ago
we need to get more clever with this elephant in the room. some startup needs to come up with a Garbage > Energy solution. The rest can maybe go into making bricks for construction. its a slow boil and we are not focused
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  Aren't those called incinerators? We have those.
visarga 9y ago
AI can help us here. This is an example of automated trash sorting (optical sorting) from 4 years ago. I expect today we can sort trash even more efficienty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc Another idea would be an army of cleaning bots that can be let loose in a forest, on a beach or on roadside to methodically collect all trash. Even underwater drones could be used to clean up beaches. I think cleaning bots is the way forward.
sevensor 9y ago
When we moved to a house in an area with municipal composting, we were amazed by how much our trash volume was reduced by diverting compostable materials to the compost stream. Some of that is food waste, but a lot of it is things you'd never consume -- vegetable peels, eggshells, old coffee grounds, even food-soiled unwaxed corrugated cardboard (i.e. pizza boxes). On any given week, it's half or more by volume, and well over half by weight.

54 points by aagha 9y ago

I really appreciate the authors of this post for their effort in raising awareness but I think it will fall on deaf ears. A few things that they mentioned that they didn't go into crazy depth are origination of plastic(s), transportation costs of waste, and taxation as a policy to reduce waste. Did you know that glass is reusable, unfortunately it's so heavy that it's worth nothing to recycle. The other problem is where the funding for recycling goes. In the New York City metro area, a bottle deposit tax is used towards education. If everyone recycles, where/how is the government going to plug that hole, however small it may be? The better question that the author should be asking is what type of policy(s) should be implemented in order to make it so that people want to or are forced to reuse verses to not even think about throwing things out. The only conclusion that I see is a super high tax. Unfortunately,most people don't really care unless it hits them in the wallet. You would be suprised. You could make the fines incredibly high or jail people like they do in Singapore. If Singapore can do it, why can't New York City?

Spooky23 9y ago
I think the failure to reuse glass is a failure of imagination. Why not have consumers refill product? Get your shampoo refilled at a machine in the aisle. Tax the plastic bottle.
- wincy 9y ago
  You would have to make it punitively expensive for that to sway me. I pay $10 for a giant bottle of shampoo from Costco, if it suddenly became $10 + $5 plastic bottle tax I'd probably still just pay the $15 rather than refill the bottle.
  - opportune 9y ago
    I'd wager the same would not be true if that $5 saved after income tax represented 30 minutes or more of work on the job. Sure you might not refill the bottle but empty reusable bottle sowed become more common/affordable everywhere, and plenty of poorer people would definitely recycle. You're just a single person, if you're talking about policy you need to look at the total impact
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    The evidence is overwhelmingly against you[1], given how the plastic bag tax in Ireland and now the UK has shown it does significantly increase reuse, even for nominal amounts like a 5p charge per bag. You might not want to save money, but most consumers do. You're falling into the trap of "everyone is exactly like me", where you're in fact the exception, not the norm. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...
    - esrauch 9y ago
      I think bags are quite different: the hassle of reusable bags is really low, they weigh almost nothing, and they have other real advantages over the plastic bags (they don't break). Many US states have bottle deposits for a similar "nominal" amount per bottle and the majority of people don't do it: when I was a broke college student some friends and I did it for a little while but the math really didn't work out even then.
      - Spooky23 9y ago
        Bottle deposits are very effective. Aluminum soda cans have a 60% recycling rate vs 30% for most other materials.
      - mattmanser 9y ago
        My Aunt & Uncle and in Holland did it all the time and as far as I could tell everyone did it (I'm from UK, we don't have a scheme like that). In this article after a very quick google they report a 90% return rate in Holland (I'm not going to spend time digging into where the 90% comes from): http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69 So it might be a cultural thing or it may be the deposit figure is too low. As far as I remember in Holland it was 10 cents when I was a kid in the 90s, which would be about a dime per bottle.
        esrauch 9y ago
        It certainly is cultural: in Switzerland the rate of recycling is extremely high without and deposit. To clarify, in my experience what happens in the US is most people recycle bottles at curbside pickup, rather than drive somewhere to get 5 cents per can. In cities homeless tend to go around and collect all of the cans from the curb and redeem them.
  - kaybe 9y ago
    Where there is a bottle tax poor people collecting and returning the bottles soon emerge. As long as you leave it somewhere accessible, someone will come and return it, especially for $5.
  - Scoundreller 9y ago
    The giant bottles require less packaging material per unit of volume, so you’re already making a better choice.
- yostrovs 9y ago
  Lack of creativity, and often bad reasons, inevitably result in taxation as a way to get people to behave how you'd like. Punish, punish, punish and maybe they'll learn something.
- pixl97 9y ago
  Because your health is generally safer when we don't. Got MSRA on your throwaway plastic bottle, no problem it's going to the dump. Got MSRA on your refillable bottle? Better steam clean it first or peoples heads might start falling off.
ams6110 9y ago
A high tax on garbage will only incent illegal disposal. Dumping stuff in ravines, on other people's property, etc.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dvdkhlng 9y ago
  Not necessarily, you could tax the production/sale of goods that usually contribute to garbage. For example in Germany, it's mostly the producers of goods who have to pay for disposal of corresponding (packaging) waste, thereby creating an incentive to reduce packaging or rely on reusable bins etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual_system_of_waste_collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual...
  - Roodgorf 9y ago
    I agree. Placing a greater burden on the side of the producers to deal with the trash they produce seems like the most logical approach to me. If X company wants to make something with a bunch of plastic packaging they will have to pay for the impact that will have. If they want that to eat into their profits, fine, but I think the more likely scenario is that that they will pass as much of that cost on to consumers as they can, ideally also driving down demand for those products.

jimrandomh 9y ago

Looking at the numbers, I just don't see a real problem here. Landfill is three dimensional, and can be built on top of; it would take quite a lot of orders of magnitude population growth before we started running low on places to put it.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
Landfills emit gases and things collapse as the waste changes over time. They aren't perfect foundations for future construction.

thisisit 9y ago

Unrelated but the scrolling on site is super weird. Clicking on Lagos takes to the top of the page.

gumby 9y ago
Not really unrelated — if the article is hard to read it’s a problem. And what’s with the scrolling that sends small “fortune cookie” messages scrolling across the photos? That all simply distracts from the article and makes you have to find your place again. Sad.

rabboRubble 9y ago

For anybody interested in the totality of their garbage output, I can't recommend this book enough: https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Land-Secret-Trail-Trash/dp/031615461X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1 https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Land-Secret-Trail-Trash/dp/03...? I had my book club read this book, and so many times, for so many other books this books came up in conversation. Interesting facts: * Glass is recycled in order to grind it up and spread it over landfills to keep down dust. In this way the glass is counted as recycled and not garbage despite it ended up being in the dump. * Roman era landfills are still leaking effluant. * Plastics might be marked and marketed as recyclable but many plastics are better off as garbage. Better yet, never created and used in the first place. * Whenever a natural compost toilet has a problem, more sawdust is almost always the answer to fixing whatever ails it. (Not really in the book, one of our bookclub members had hippie parents). I would follow up this book with another set in Mumbai: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067553/ref=as_li_ss_tl https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067553/ref=as_li_ss_tl Somehow we need to do a better job at reducing poverty and imroving consumer recycling habits. No miracle solutions in this book. Just griding, abject poverty, living in the garbage of Mumbai.

tmnvix 9y ago

In our moral crusade against impending environmental disaster, it astounds me that packaging is still given little thought beyond what we should do with it once we already have it. I think it would be a good idea to place some kind of rating on packaging to encourage purchasers to be more cognisant of what they are actually taking responsibility for beyond just the contents. I can't help but feel like we are going backwards here - especially when I see things like individual bananas being sold on trays[1]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/WPaVBTv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WPaVBTv.jpg

titzer 9y ago
In Germany consumers are legally allowed to unpackage items directly in the store and the store is required to handle the leftover packaging.
- ndh2 9y ago
  Very few people do that, though. Certainly not enough for the stores to do anything about packaging.

gumby 9y ago

> Is this just garbage, or is it a resource? About 10 years ago I looked at using engineered extremophile bacteria to mine metals from dumps. The tech was complex but doable even then and there were other things we could have done too in terms of remediation. What killed it? Local government. They pay to manage and maintain dumps. I offered to take over their “brownfield” sites and change their cost center into a revenue stream. Everyone I talked to thought it would be a great idea...but wanted so much in royalties that it would not be worth doing. They’d rather strangle the goose.

gregw134 9y ago
Could you give us an idea of how that could work? I can't even begin to imagine how that could be done.
- gumby 9y ago
  Briefly: 1: grind up the middens (sorry archeologists!) 2: put the resulting slurry in a bioreactor (an open tank would work) with your bacteria and stir for a while 3: rinse and drain tank. Spin down the rinsate. 4. Profit!
YokoZar 9y ago
Why not buy out a local dump and run it "cheaper" then, under the existing contracts?
- gumby 9y ago
  Good question. To start with we only wanted "full" dumps (ones that had been closed) rather than having to deal with the operation of a dump as well. There are numerous landfill sites that have been covered with dirt and now have to be looked after. Also there's a higher level of valuable waste in the old dumps, though that wasn't a major factor.

nicolas_t 9y ago

> On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much That surprised me with the quantity of garbage due to overpacking in Japan, I'd have expected more. For example, I just bought 2 salads to eat at home, each salad is in a plastic container with some ice sticked to it and enveloped separately in a plastic bag. Then those two salads are in a plastic bag. It's an amazing amount of waste for no real reason.

Joe-Z 9y ago
Plastic bags don't really weigh that much. Maybe Americans use a little less plastic bags (do they, though?) but throw away more other stuff, like plastic gadget crap.
- titzer 9y ago
  Having personally dug hundreds, perhaps thousands of those evil little fuckers out of the sands of beaches all over the world, I would say that gram for gram these are one of the worst kinds of pollution man has created. Plastic shopping bags are a real bitch when they get into the sand. They often fill up with sand and become like a 10kg buried beachball. One literally needs to dig completely under them to get them out without tearing them up and leaving part of the bag under the sand. All of those plastic bags basically glue together the beach so that the normal erosive action of the sand being moved around by tides and waves no longer grinds things up like it normally would. That means the whole beach gets stagnant and rotten like a swamp. Really nasty.
  - Joe-Z 9y ago
    Oh sure, I despise the ubiquitous hand-outs of plastic bags as much as anyone, I was just making that comment to give a reason for the weight-difference in spite of the perceived over-usage of packaging in Japan. I make it a point to refuse plastic bags whenever possible (which is pretty much always). I find it incredible that they are still considered the standard mode for packaging your shit. If shops would only give them out when asked for it, the number of used plastic bags would surely plummet. One anecdote I found amusing is when I was in Yosemite: I bought a couple of t-shirts and told the lady at the check-out she doesn't need to give me a plastic bag for them, since I have my backpack with me anyways. She was pleasantly surprised and thanked me. It's one of the most well-known national parks in the US, where they make it a point to educate people on taking care of your environment, yet they hand out plastic bags with every purchase in the souvenir shop.

artur_makly 9y ago

we need to get more clever with this elephant in the room. some startup needs to come up with a Garbage > Energy solution. The rest can maybe go into making bricks for construction. its a slow boil and we are not focused

theandrewbailey 9y ago
Aren't those called incinerators? We have those.

visarga 9y ago

AI can help us here. This is an example of automated trash sorting (optical sorting) from 4 years ago. I expect today we can sort trash even more efficienty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc Another idea would be an army of cleaning bots that can be let loose in a forest, on a beach or on roadside to methodically collect all trash. Even underwater drones could be used to clean up beaches. I think cleaning bots is the way forward.

sevensor 9y ago

When we moved to a house in an area with municipal composting, we were amazed by how much our trash volume was reduced by diverting compostable materials to the compost stream. Some of that is food waste, but a lot of it is things you'd never consume -- vegetable peels, eggshells, old coffee grounds, even food-soiled unwaxed corrugated cardboard (i.e. pizza boxes). On any given week, it's half or more by volume, and well over half by weight.