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Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste'
- PeachPlum 9y agoBritain's largest export, by volume, is waste paper / cardboard. It was going to China and coming back as cardboard.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Manglano 9y agoAt least, properly separated, it degrades and can be reprocessed into more paper and cardboard. The US exports CRT televisions and chipsets for electronics with such minimal production quality as to be considered destined-for-disposal. In some regions, pirated materials derived from metals, petrochemicals, and advanced dyes are immediately destroyed and shoveled into landfills: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers-crush-nearly-two-million-pieces-of-pirated-news-photo/51341789?esource=SEO_GIS_CDN_Redirect http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers-c... The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big way...
- ctrl-j 9y ago> The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big way... As well they should. Back when I was growing up we weren't taught to recycle, we were taught the three R's. 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle And those R's were supposed to be in order of priority.
- Aloha 9y agoI'd love to buy more of my stuff in glass.
- Manglano 9y agoEven something as simple as being able to have a clerk fill my jar with a weight of instant coffee would cut down my recycling mass by an average of about 50g per week and eliminate some plastic. Glass doesn't have a limit on recycle phases if handled correctly but all plastic other than PLA has a pretty short recycle lifetime.
- cat199 9y ago> The US exports CRT televisions and chipsets for electronics with such minimal production quality as to be considered destined-for-disposal. and is far from unique in doing so..
- pishpash 9y agoAn improvement over opium.
- mlvljr 9y ago^ Downvoted by the decriminalization crowd :)
- igouy 9y agoIt used to be pulped and used to make cardboard in Britain, for example at Carrongrove Mill. http://www.baph.org.uk/forum/topic/carrongrove-mill-denny/ http://www.baph.org.uk/forum/topic/carrongrove-mill-denny/
- foxhop 9y agoWaste cardboard composts down in a short season. I wish we didn't waste precious high energy fossil fuels on moving paper back and forth.
- pharke 9y agoThis is a domino we should pay attention to.
- Manglano 9y agoThe almost-invisible consumer habits of the past 100 years circumscribe virtually all of the greatest environmental disasters of the next 100, bearing in mind that "environmental disaster" has only existed since the steam engine or the logging of the Old Growth forests, depending upon where your measure of advanced development begins. When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.
- pmorici 9y agoI don't think environmental disasters are something unique to modern times. There have been books written about the environmental problems the ancient Romans & Greeks faced.
- labster 9y agoEnvironmental disasters existed, sure, but they were mostly called something like "the vengeance of the gods". Most of them do represent a form of Themic justice, as our human hubris at being lords of this world causes us to be swept away by storm or fire.
- comicjk 9y agoLet me quote you a passage about Roman gold mines: "Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind." I agree, though, that this kind of problem was localized and was not in the minds of Romans the way it is in ours.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago> this kind of problem was localized I wouldn't consider the mass deforestation of the entire Mediterranean basin "localized".
- superquest 9y agoIt's amazing that a "waste shipping industry" between parties on opposite sides of the planet can exist at all. I guess it's possible because "developed nations" send back empty container ships which might as well be turned into dump trucks?
- mistermann 9y agoThe sheer size and capability of China (hundreds of millions of people willing to work extremely hard in exchange for little money) has allowed a wide variety of things to happen in the world that otherwise simply wouldn't be possible. Their deciding that they no longer are willing to participate in things like this can be a massive (in a time frame and to a degree that a lot of people will be utterly confused and scratching their heads "but how can this be, it doesn't make any sense!!!???") game changer.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoI'm not sure its the 'game changer' they wanted. Labor rates going up in China means, more automation in the US. Its not a matter of them-vs-us jobs; its a matter of cheap labor vs automation. And the smart money is on automation today, since its growing explosively in manufacturing and warehousing.
- sliverstorm 9y agoThat's exactly it, the trade imbalance means empty ships going back to China, ergo freight to China is supposedly very cheap.
- macawfish 9y agoI am dismayed at how little people care about this. If more people (not even everyone) had some basic knowledge of plastics and the will to rinse the containers they recycle, sorting would be much more efficient. But I'd be willing to bet that most people use their recycling bin as a kind of funny second trash can. I know my roommates do. We got fined and they still put dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials). Effectively though, the recycling is being used like a special garbage can.
- greggman 9y agowhy can't this be solved at the recycling center? why do individuals need to deal with this at all? several municipalities handle separation at the waste center. seems on all accounts a win. one place to monitor for doing it correctly. one place to easily apply advancements in solutions. no need to try to herd cats (no need to try to get millions of people to follow exactly the correct proceedures). I watched teams of supposedly smart colleagues be unable to correctly separate their trash. if the average HN reader can't do it why would anyone expect to general population to ever be any better at it?
- dmm 9y agoWhy not just package everything in literal money? People would dutifully rinse everything.
- madengr 9y agoFunny, but good idea. I remember when glass used to have a deposit value on it. We still get local milk in refundable glass containers.
- dalbasal 9y agoThat works pretty well. The only catch is that you have to mandate the deposit on all bottles, not just glass ones. Otherwise it's cheaper to just sell everything in plastics. Some countries do it. It might work for phones/laptops too. Small deposit, most of the used stuff ends up delivered to the place of your choice. Like the shopping trolley system. ^If you already have big publicly accessible bottle recycle places, these will the raided.
- CalChris 9y agoA similar ripple is happening as China scales back on coal. Coal gets mined in Utah and shipped on unit trains out to Stockton, CA and put on freighters to China. A local developer is trying to move that port to Oakland but upwind of a residential area. He'd been turned down a few times but he tricked an administrator into a bad contract which the city has rejected. A lawsuit was filed. http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-judgment/ http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-judgmen... http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal-consumption-drives-global-slowdown-emissions http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal... I don't think Tagami will have demand but the lawsuit goes on.
- thaeli 9y agoThe Chinese government has already relaxed the proposed rules somewhat, in response to criticism that the increased standards were actually impossible to meet with current processes and equipment. And this article fails to mention that many of the Chinese companies in this sector were grossly negligent in their handling of the "contamination" - of course no one wants to say "our buyer in China had their license revoked because they were literally pouring toxic waste in a river" but that's the sort of thing that was going on. There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the long term, this is definitely the path forward. The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.
- intrasight 9y agoI agree that more automation is going to happen. But I also think that regulations which increase recycleability will be required.
- njarboe 9y agoModern dumps can be very environmentally friendly. The bottom can be clay sealed with leak monitoring to protect the ground water. With a little extra effort they can designed for methane capture to prevent problematic off gassing. Maybe aluminum and other purish metal scrap gets taken out of the waste stream and the rest goes back to the Earth. Some carbon capture happens and the site can be mined in the future if it seems worthwhile. Add video monitoring of what goes in for future prospectors to evaluate the ore body and call it a day. Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.
- Aloha 9y agoShipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense. But Recycling itself is a good idea - we used to do this, AT&T did it with everything they made, milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more, but right now, those costs are still present, they're just being passed down to an unknown party, at an unknown point in the future. We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.
- pishpash 9y agoManufacturers should be the ones forced to take their products back. That way they (the only ones who can) will take the cost into account and design differently. No more greedy planned obsolescence, no more flimsy crap that breaks in 10 days, no more cries about right to repair. The right incentive solves all the problems.
- Aloha 9y ago
- Spooky23 9y agoIn my mind this illustrates the obvious flaws in the globalized economy where we build these wacky supply chains based on exploiting poorer countries. Other examples abound. Shipping chickens harvested in Arkansas to be butchered in China and sold in Massachusetts is another.
- maxerickson 9y agoSnopes doesn't think that chickens are going on such an incredible journey. https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken-reshipped/ https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken-reshipped/
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoI highly recommend the documentary Plastic China. It is heartbreaking to watch the stories and struggles of the families that are filmed. It’s available to stream on Prime video. It is a real eye opener for what happens next to some of the waste we throw into the recycle bin, long after we have forgotten about it.
- antris 9y agoGot Prime, but "This title is not available in your current location" Heh. Thanks.
- redshirt 9y agoSeems like Germany had this one figured out. One non-recyclable thing found in your building’s garbage and you’re all in trouble. The US is way too lax on enforcing good practices. We waste too much, and when we do feel good recycling drives we do it lazily.
- foxhop 9y agoAgreed but like maybe companies shouldn't produce waste packaging, etc. This sounds an awful lot like "blame the litter bugs". Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk
- redshirt 9y agoHow about not buying stuff with poor packaging. Sure, sometimes we don’t have a choice, but many times we do. Often it’s as simple as preparing food at home versus getting take out. I’d prefer laws to mandate recycleable packaging. Problem solved. Petrochemical industry will be ticked.
- richardknop 9y agoPeople working 12 hours per day don't really have time to cook. Also if stuff wrapped in plastic is cheaper, people will buy it as money is a limited resource they need for so many other things. Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this - mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little consumers is a fool's endeavor.
- adrianN 9y agoLuckily most people don't work 12 hours per day.
- richardknop 9y agoLots of poor and blue collar working class people do 12 hour work days (for example truckers or workers in construction). And these are the people that are usually described here as "primitive" consumers who only eat fast food and buy cheap prepared food in plastic containers.
- foxhop 9y agoAlso Related: https://plasticbank.org/ https://plasticbank.org/ http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle-brick.html http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle-brick.html
- spodek 9y agoI'm confused by Plasticbank. They seem to pay for plastic. While they divert plastic from oceans, doesn't paying for plastic increase demand? It sounds like the Cobra Effect -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect -- where paying for dead cobras, intending to lower their numbers, motivated people to breed more, which increased their numbers.
- snowpanda 9y agoOne way this could be partially solved is with better technology. Like a digital trashcan that analyzes your trash and alerts you/rejects your trash it if it's not sorted correctly, maybe tell you what item wasn't recyclable. Just brainstorming here. It would help me, because apparently I keep making mistakes in what I think is recyclable and what isn't. Even though I read the guidelines for years now.
- cdolan 9y agoSearch for CleanRobotics, they are building one in my city
- convolvatron 9y agoimpact on my neighborhood economy is severe. i don't know how much is the chinese decision and how much other factors. but we used to have people who regularly stopped by to pick up bulk cardboard and scrap metal. apparently cardboard isn't worth anything at all anymore and we have to manage the impact on our waste stream. and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb, and id requirements have been toughened up to discourage theft, we can't even get the homeless meth addicts to haul away steel anymore.
- driverdan 9y ago> and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb Since when? I'm pretty sure it's around $0.10/lb right now and stainless is around $0.30/lb.
- convolvatron 9y agothats what we get for clean hot roll scrap around here. none of the people who used to come by with trucks think that its worth the gas money any more. $0.10 is definitely worth gas money, so idk
- algesten 9y agoOf the vegetables in the supermarket, the ecological / organic have the most packaging. I find it ironic that if I want to use reusable bags to buy greens, I am pretty much forced to go non-organic.
- analog31 9y agoIt strikes me that the packaging is to prevent you from getting the organic goodies at the inorganic price.
- oppositelock 9y agoGood for China, they've got an environmental nightmare to deal with, and part of it comes from the US offloading lots of "recycling" operations there, and I use that term loosely, particularly for electronics. We also "export" pollution to China by buying cheaper products that would be more expensive if they didn't externalize their pollution costs, and it's sure better to externalize that pollution abroad than domestically. The US, in my opinion, has been burying its head in the sand about the pollution which occurs when manufacturing everything that we use. Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling bin doesn't end up in the dump. Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals. Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into existing paper process.
- mc32 9y agoIf we were to add externalities into the cost of things, it's likely this will have the added effect of bringing some of the previously off-shored jobs back home. Win-win. Environment wins, blue-collar, non-college American workers win. Possibly offsetting some of the "sharing" economy jobs trend and bring back some real jobs.
- hguhghuff 9y agoSend it to the next cheapest place to dump garbage outside a rich country. Probably Africa ... someone there will surely be happy to take money to dump first world "recycling" by a roadside. What's really needed is a ban on exporting garbage/recycling from this country, not a game of musical chairs whilst various countries ban "importing". Or just dump it in the Pacific Ocean .... oh hang on we already do.
- zumu 9y agoI don't understand why there's so little education in America about what is recyclable and what isn't. When I lived in Japan, every district in most cities had detailed documentation about what goes where on what day, how to clean it, etc. When you go to restaurants, there's images of the items that are recyclable on their respective recycle bins and images of what goes in the trash on the trash bins. There's also drains to pour out pet bottles, etc. Is it that hard to spread some basic documentation about recycling?
- diogenescynic 9y agoEasy—there’s more money to be made from Americans being wasteful.
- zumu 9y agoAren't we losing money by no longer being able to sell our recyclables to China? Isn't the crux of this article the exact opposite of what you're saying?
- dis-sys 9y agothe biggest impact for some people reading Hacker News is that there is now a pretty big uncertainty on those "second hand" Xeon processors you purchase on ebay.
- lucaspiller 9y agoIf anything I’d say this will increase the supply of second hand hardware, as it will be cheaper to resell it, than break it down and recycle it.
- Animats 9y agoThis is going to work out great. All the technology for automatically sorting and recycling plastic exists. There are production plants using it. The best sorters aren't widely used yet, but they're available. Even ABS/polyethylene/polystyrene sorting is available. The US has been shipping unsorted wasted to China, but now will have to sort and recycle it domestically. The biggest plastic recycling plant in the US is in Riverside, California.[1] In go mixed bottles, out come injection molding pellets. The technology is working at scale right now. Bloomberg sees this ban as a boost for the US plastics industry.[2] [1] https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside-the-worlds-largest-plastic-bottle-recycling-plant-0 https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-s-blow-to-recycling-boosts-u-s-s-185-billion-plastic-bet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-s-b...
- njarboe 9y agoThat would be great. Bring on the robot sorters. Put everything in one bin and sort at the dump/transfer station.
- rwmj 9y agoWe have that in the UK now, except that it's still partially sorted by hand. Starting at 44'30", this programme has a section showing a mixed recycling facility: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3f5bnw http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3f5bnw
- nikanj 9y agoCheck this out, from Finland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1sOPqM_VA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1sOPqM_VA
- Animats 9y agoNice. Most of the sorting is done by mechanical methods - shakers, screens, flotation tanks, magnets - but most plants still have a few manual pickers pulling out strange stuff. That's a robot job. Then glass and plastics are chopped into pellets, and sorted by color and material. That uses the same vision technology used to sort farm products. Vision-based sorting is so fast that it's routine to sort individual peas using machine vision. Sorting glass cullet into clear, amber, and green works just as well. Sorting plastic by type is rarer, but here's a line for that.[1] Here's a overview of a production recycling plant.[2] A random mix of stuff goes in, and stage by stage, each material flow becomes more uniform, until material ready for reuse comes out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0
- waibelp 9y agoI'm a little bit disappointed as the story just looks for new ways to get rid of the plastic problem. Why not produce and use less plastic? In the EU some countries ban plastic bags, others introduced or increased prices for bags. On the other hand more paper bags are available and prices for them dropped, too, resulting in more people using paper bags or starting to use cotton-bags.
- anonymous5133 9y agoAgree. A lot of this has to do with habits. If you know that plastic bags are 10 cents each then suddenly you quickly learn to always bring 10 reusable bags with you to save the money.
- lucaspiller 9y agoIt’s been like this where I live for 5 years and I still don’t remember to take plastic bags back to the store...
- usrusr 9y agoMostly I have just gotten very good at balancing a surprising number of items on my body while walking out of the store. (and I started long before we got a plastic bag fee, fresh bags rarely crossed my personal convenience/waste threshold and I still happily pay when they do)
- evgen 9y agoThe problem with solutions like this is that life is more complicated. Plastic bags are easy and energy efficient to produce and to ship to the end-user. Paper bags degrade incredibly poorly in the anaerobic environment of landfills and they use more energy for shipping to the end-user. IIRC, a paper bag that is not reused three times before being thrown away or recycled ends up using more energy and resources than the plastic bags being banned, and a high-density plastic bag needs to be reused 10 times, and a cloth bag needs to be used 150+ times to be better than low density plastic bags.
- Feniks 9y agoUs Europeans use Africa. There was a scandal with chemical waste killing a few Africans couple of years back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_d... I think that countries should take care of their own waste. That's what we get taught as kids right? Clean up after yourself.
- evolve2k 9y ago>'CEO Steve Miller says the robot uses cameras and artificial intelligence to separate recycling from trash "in the same way that a person would do it," but faster and more accurately.' This looks like an issue we could actually address. What if every recycler world wide could get their hands on open source AI sorting software and open robotics. Anyone know of any open source projects along these lines?
- spodek 9y agoHomo sapiens have existed hundreds of thousands of years without plastic. 13 hours this post has been up and almost no mention of reducing plastic consumption. It costs zero, sends the signal upstream to produce less, and solves all these problems. How do we not even talk about using less? I reduced packaged food by about 95% and found it improved my life. My diet became more delicious, convenient, and cheaper, based more on fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, and grains. Here's a video on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5 http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5. Here's a podcast episode on it: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-spodek http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-spodek. It's been more than six months since I've emptied my landfill garbage and months since I emptied my recycling. My compost, on the other hand, I empty a couple times a month. How is the headline for this story not: "It's past time we stop producing garbage by 90%. It will improve your life"?
- pwgorge 9y agoPart of the solution might be to ban the import of goods packaged in plastic.
- crb002 9y agoShip it to Nevada. Use solar powered smelters and centrifuges.
- candiodari 9y agoBut ... if there was actual recycling (you know, re-using of materials) this wouldn't be a problem ! This only makes sense if environmentalists (politicians and activists) are lying about what recycling is. Either lying outright, or lying by not doing basic checks on their claims of what gets reused.
- cdolan 9y agoSomething interesting not discussed thus far: Most glass that is sent to recycle, if broken and not directly re-usable, is used as ‘daily cover’. That means they grind it up into bits, then spread a 1” layer on top of the landfill each day to help introduce stability, and start the decomposition process.
- Futurebot 9y agoThis is probably a very good move. At some point, the clever marketing behind "Keep America Beautiful" will lose its believability, and people will demand what the creators behind KAB have been trying to avoid: corporate responsibility for creating less wasteful products. What we have now, in the form of the recycling industry and its associated regulations, are an outsourcing of that responsibility to individual citizens, cities, and states. Regulations in this area need to shift from recycling to sustainability. "KAB downplayed industry's role in despoiling the earth, while relentlessly hammering home the message of each person's responsibility for the destruction of nature, one wrapper at a time. ....KAB was a pioneer in sowing confusion about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption." Then in the 80s the industry faced another challenge; the landfill crises that led to recycling. Heather Rogers writes: "All this eco-friendly activity put business and manufacturers on the defensive. With landfill space shrinking, new incinerators ruled out, water dumping long ago outlawed and the public becoming more environmentally aware by the hour, the solutions to the garbage disposal problem were narrowing. Looking forward, manufacturers must have perceived their range of options as truly horrifying: bans on certain materials and industrial processes; production controls; minimum standards for product durability." "In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America’s garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requiring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the “litterbug” became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, “littering” is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn’t realize what was happening until years later." https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/recycling-is-bullshit-make-nov-15-zero-waste-day-not-america-recycles-day.html https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/recycl... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-campaigns/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-lit...