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What if they can't make a profit? It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the ind

What if they can't make a profit? It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.

philwelch 9y ago
This kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.
- tomkarlo 9y ago
  The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills. There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet. It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation. If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.
    - tomkarlo 9y ago
      You can't base recycling decisions only on what's "cost effective" while not considering revising the fees people pay to dispose of household. Generating trash isn't supposed to be inherently costless, and it really shouldn't be. Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly. "It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump. The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources. [0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recycling http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...
      - basseq 9y ago
        Doesn't this beget an economic feedback cycle? I.e., if it's more cost productive to send to a landfill, then more waste will be sent to a landfill, and so the costs to do so will go up as "demand" (waste) outstrips "supply" (landfill space). Then the cost effective pendulum swings back to recycling. Is that already happening? In some ways, recycling should pay for itself. Consumers generate raw material for free, which through aggregation, sorting, and rectification (de-generating into raw-er materials) gains value for recyclers.

philwelch 9y ago

This kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.

tomkarlo 9y ago
The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills. There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet. It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.
- philwelch 9y ago
  Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation. If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.
  - tomkarlo 9y ago
    You can't base recycling decisions only on what's "cost effective" while not considering revising the fees people pay to dispose of household. Generating trash isn't supposed to be inherently costless, and it really shouldn't be. Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly. "It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump. The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources. [0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recycling http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...
    - basseq 9y ago
      Doesn't this beget an economic feedback cycle? I.e., if it's more cost productive to send to a landfill, then more waste will be sent to a landfill, and so the costs to do so will go up as "demand" (waste) outstrips "supply" (landfill space). Then the cost effective pendulum swings back to recycling. Is that already happening? In some ways, recycling should pay for itself. Consumers generate raw material for free, which through aggregation, sorting, and rectification (de-generating into raw-er materials) gains value for recyclers.