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Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling
- dang 8y agoRelated from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168.
- ggm 8y agoJohn McCarthy wrote about how future generations would welcome us storing immensely valuable VOCs and complex chemicals and metals underground for them. In all seriousness, waste stream management is like education or healthcare: it's only a net cost if you believe the externalities aren't part of your economic model. If you go full lifecycle, it's jobs, and revenue, and adds to the economy in lots of useful ways. Turning down radiation storage is like saying no to free money. We should all welcome better long-term storage and compete to host it.
- AtlasBarfed 8y agoExternalities involve regulation, and that means it isn't real economics to the laissez faire believers of the magic self-correcting free market. I'd like to say they are a fringe, but the think tanks and endowed chairs have made them the dominant thinking in popular culture and, sadly, American politics. Radioation storage is a product of obsolete solid rod reactors. LFTRs and other reactors can use them for fuel.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Externalities involve regulation Regulation is one possible response to externalities, but externalities don't fundamentally involve radiation. > and that means it isn't real economics to the laissez faire believers of the magic self-correcting free market. To be fair, there are more pragmatic laissez-faire types that acknowledge the existence of externalities but merely deny that regulation mitigates them in practice, suggesting instead that if you respond to an extension with regulation you've now got two problems. And even most people who aren't hardcore laissez-faire types acknowledge that regulatory capture is a real thing.
- Analemma_ 8y ago> Regulation is one possible response to externalities, but externalities don't fundamentally involve radiation. The only realistic ways to handle externalities are regulations, class-action lawsuits, and (Pigouvian) taxes. Laissez-faire market types typically oppose all three.
- dllthomas 8y agoFor a sufficiently small externality, "ignore it" is a perfectly valid option. I think that's uncontroversial, although there would be substantial disagreement on the actual threshold.
- ggm 8y agoWould you call the worldwide systemic crisis in waste stream management precipitated by China tightening regulation as an instance of For a sufficiently small externality, "ignore it" is a perfectly valid option because personally I wouldn't.
- dllthomas 8y agoWould you call it a fundamental feature of an externality?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Leary 8y agoRumor has it China stop importing plastic after this documentary came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54
- schiffern 8y agoGreat documentary, thanks. This puts the recent "90% of ocean plastic comes from Asian/African rivers" story[1] in a drastically new light. The issue was previously framed in terms of poor waste management due to lack of infrastructure for native waste (agreed) and uneducated Asian/African consumers (a blame-laundering technique that the disposable product industry has already successfully deployed in the US[2]). But on further examination, it seems the countries with "good infrastructure"[3] and "well-educated wasters" may be part of (or even a majority of) the problem. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913389 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/21651/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... [3] "good waste infrastructure" being, in part, a euphemism for "keep that expensive-to-handle waste in a box until it's outside our border so it's technically Not Our Problem"
- sundvor 8y agoI found that really hard to watch, especially the children stepping on deity knows what part. Even then I wish everyone would see it. Humanity sucks sometimes ... if not most of the time.
- RobertRoberts 8y agoA friend of mine has a chronically homeless brother that still does day jobs (doesn't do drugs so is consistently hired) and he said he was working cleaning out the toxic ashes from trash burning center and was treated badly. "..they made him wear a radioactive exposure badge and fired him when the badge tipped over the safe range." The union bosses wouldn't even go down there and called orders from megaphones. There are videos/photos of many other countries that look much worse than this, think India, even Mexico. Edit: The homeless man I mentioned lives in a major city in the US, not a third world country.
- steve19 8y agoI wonder how many people have lost their jobs. I don't blame China for banning it, it makes sense, but I would hate to be employed in China knowing that the government might any day ban it with no notice.
- konschubert 8y agoWhat are you implying? Politics happen in every country. Banning the import is the same effect as starting a trade war or adding high import tax.
- al_ramich 8y agonot something I had much background on but did a little reading and the numbers prior to the ban are pretty incredible. Interesting to see the shift in projected import/exports of plastics to 2030. A big shift in China policy. http://geographical.co.uk/people/development/item/2811-china-s-plastic-import-ban-in-numbers http://geographical.co.uk/people/development/item/2811-china...
- beerlord 8y agoIndia has banned single-use plastics (starting 2022). https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/single-use-plastic-ban-india_us_5b3a09b6e4b0f3c221a28a07 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/single-use-plastic-ban-... Other countries simply need to do the same. France has banned certain single-use plastic items starting in 2020. If a side-effect is less processed food and fast-food being consumed, then great.
- jakobegger 8y agoThis is the only real solution. Everything else is pointless. As long as we keep producing plastics, they will end up in the environment, and whatever doesn't will be a pain to recycle. We already have alternatives for almost everything. We have single use plates and cutlery made from cardboard or wood, we have compostable packaging foil for vegetables and compostable trash can liners. The only problem is adoption -- as long as plastic is slightly cheaper, no one will use it. I really hope the EU comes down hard on plastic packaging -- imagine if all packaging was compostable, you could just throw it on a pile in your back yard and it would turn into fertile soil within a couple of months!
- pjc50 8y ago> imagine if all packaging was compostable How much would the loss rates of packaged goods increase? Shelf stability is a very useful property which saves food from being wasted.
- Nae3Au5x 8y agoCompostable does not mean it decays under your eyes. E.g. polyurethanes are marginally biodegradeable by fungi and still last years when the conditions are not ideal for them.
- jakobegger 8y agoIf things need to be sealed, just use reusable glass containers. When I was a kid, yoghurt came in glass jars. But most stuff would be fine just wrapped in paper or cardboard. Also, it's not like long shelf life is a necessity. Lots of stores manage to sell fresh goods without a lot of waste. Sure, it won't be a trivial transition, but I'm pretty sure people would find a way. It's just a question of our priorities: do we want to live in a dump just to make it easier for a supermarket to sell you 25 different types of pre-packaged chicken?
- raverbashing 8y agoThis really seems like a problem that could be helped by smarter automation (and a lot of "thinking outside the box") If plastic bags get stuck to the machines, then maybe the way to getting rid of them is looking at what happens with them as opposed to other materials. Also automated identification of materials (by optical inspection or dedicated sensors) looks like it could help.
- cdolan 8y agoThis tech is already applied to MRFs and it still doesn’t work 100% if the time, causing downtime on the line, and lost revenues.
- mihaifm 8y agoI don't understand why it's so hard to build a machine that separates plastic from other materials. I mean in agriculture we have machines that separate tiny seeds from anything else, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have a plastic sorting machine.
- lbriner 8y agoBecause of the massive variation in shapes and sizes, the fact that some plastics might have other trash inside them and that plastic drinks bottles are usually more than one type of plastic. There are machines but they can only perform basic sorting so you still need people to do the "intelligent" part.
- schiffern 8y ago>I don't understand why it's so hard ... we have machines that separate tiny seeds Not hard, just expensive. And understanding how seeds are separated (not only that they are separated) makes it clear why plastics require so many more steps. For seeds, it's a two-step process. First comes threshing[1], which is the act of physically breaking the seeds off the plant. Basically they solved this problem by hitting the stalks against a solid surface. This works because all the plants are the same type and age, so you can dial in a force that will break the seeds _off_ without breaking them _apart_. This won't work for plastics, because they're combined with all sorts of other materials that whacking won't dislodge. One shot of that "Plastic China" documentary[2] shows a worker using a box cutter to remove a plastic label that's shrink-wrapped around (not glued to) a crushed container. The second step is called winnowing[3], and it's basically just blowing air through the falling seeds to separate them aerodynamically from the straw and chaff. This works because seeds have a higher ballistic coefficient (mass/drag). Winnowing is also done with screens or slats, relying on the fact that seeds are of uniform size. But plastics have all different shapes and sizes. Wind winnowing can certainly be used as part of a processing chain (eg to separate films from bulk plastics), and so can screens, but they're nowhere near a complete solution. Because of these complexities, automatically processing plastic at scale requires a lot more than just those two steps (which nowadays are combined together with reaping in the cleverly-named "combine harvester" or combine[4]). That means it's expensive, and that means someone in China with cheap labor and "externalized" pollution costs (read: make your neighbors get sick and die, but don't even have the decency to pay their doctor bills or keep their windowed spouses/orphaned children off the street) can outbid you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshing [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678513 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester
- rusk 8y agoThis can only be a good thing in the long run. Exporting recyclable waste is like exporting bales of dollar bills, and paying for it.
- cdolan 8y agoI get your point but the “recyclables” we produce as Americans are not really recyclables. They are 90% recycling, 10% trash, or worse.
- rusk 8y agoYou mean that the composition of the recyclables is 10% non-recyclable thus rendering the entire thing non-recyclable? That is indeed regrettable but it's never too late to change.
- cdolan 8y agoI mean that 'single stream recycling' has pushed 'diversion from landfill' and 'recycling' rates so high that it has changed the composition of what our recycling actually consists of. Take a fictional recycling truck driving through a residential neighborhood - 10% or more of the material inside the recycling bins is going to be contaminated 'wish-cycled' material, such as barbecue laden plastic plates, nylon ropes, grease-stained pizza boxes, and soiled paper products.
- lbriner 8y agoLots of materials cost more to recycle than to make from virgin materials, even glass which is relatively easy to clean and process. Recycling creates jobs, which might be considered a benefit but from purely financial means, the cheapest method is to burn stuff and generate electricity sadly.
- mrpopo 8y agoThis comes up a lot when talking about recycling, but really the issue here is that the environment is never counted as a financial asset. Carbon/pollution taxes cannot come soon enough.
- romjak 8y agoIt would be interesting to have data about the global movement of raw materials in finished products and the restulting waste, net import and export by country, to see where waste is accumulating and where the consumption actually takes place.
- pagnol 8y agoIf you live in the Berlin area like me and are looking for ways to produce less waste, then check out this store called Unverpackt: https://original-unverpackt.de/ https://original-unverpackt.de/ It's a physical store which sells most everything a normal supermarket does but without the disposable packaging.
- dmortin 8y agoDo they sell food? (meat, frozen things, etc.) Because buying food creates the most waste for me.
- mgbmtl 8y agoIn many supermarkets/butchers, you can also bring your own resealable plastic containers for meats. Most will usually insist on washing the container for you (because of regulations), so it's usually better to ask off-peak hours.
- kazen44 8y agoso basically how stuff was sold prior to world war 2 or how most stuff is sold on lcoal markets today?
- phobosdeimos 8y agoDemographics were very different back then. Nowadays we have one person households. Also nowadays nobody peels potatoes anymore. I honestly wouldn't know how.
- IshKebab 8y ago> the city wants to "better educate our residents about what should and should not be recycled" In the UK they don't make any effort to do this and it really annoys me. There are so many things that aren't just aluminium cans or glass bottles. Can I recycle them? No way of knowing.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoIn the US even when they do try, they fail. "Toxic waste day" at the dump, I brought a pickup load of old chemical bottles from the shed, old fluorescent tubes, alkaline batteries. And took it all home again - they didn't know what to do with any of it. One guy just suggested dumping it out on my driveway to 'dry up' in the sun.
- zip1234 8y agoI had a similar experience at hazardous waste day. I think they need to train the workers better (at all).
- danans 8y agoAs a contrast, the folks at my local hazardous waste disposal facility (Alameda County, CA), were very knowledgeable and have taken all the items you listed as having been rejected at yours. So there is hope with better facilities and education.
- katrielalex 8y agoDepends where in the UK! https://www.oxford.gov.uk/info/20074/recycling_advice/25/what_goes_in_the_blue_recycling_bin https://www.oxford.gov.uk/info/20074/recycling_advice/25/wha...
- IshKebab 8y agoStill pathetically short. Needs to be at least 10 times longer or give general principles rather than listing items. For instance it doesn't say if I can recycle nuts and bolts. Rather than just adding that to the list though they could say something like "all items primarily (99% of more) made of metal between 50g and 10kg" or whatever their actual criteria are. Let me just look around the room and see all the items that list doesn't cover: pewter mugs, large steel ball bearings, vinyl film backing paper, screws, middle bits of sellotape, bike brake cables, empty metal epoxy containers, etc...
- bitL 8y agoFacebook internally uses compostable plates and cutlery in their cafeterias; I am wondering if creating those doesn't pollute environment even more than plastics.
- Theodores 8y agoIn the canteen I use they wash plates and crockery. Imagine if that practice came to America.
- rhapsodic 8y ago>In the canteen I use they wash plates and crockery. Imagine if that practice came to America American here. What is this "washing of plates and crockery" of which you speak?
- Theodores 8y agoThey also wash the cutlery! Condiments are also available in recyclable glass containers, including 'HP Sauce'. None of these single portion sachets. As of yet nobody has died of foot and mouth disease, AIDS, rabies, leprosy or any other ailment known to be communicable via forks that have been previously used. They could do better though, in post mad cow disease Britain you can't feed the food slops to pigs.
- rhapsodic 8y ago>They also wash the cutlery! From what strange and wondrous land do you come?
- maxxxxx 8y agoI work in the US and it drives me nuts that at work almost everything they use is disposable. They could easily get a dishwasher. Instead every lunch produces a huge pile of trash.
- bigpicture 8y ago
- agumonkey 8y agoFew years ago Bea Johnson, a French born US citizen, was all in the news on how she's near zero waste https://frenchly.us/bea-johnson-a-french-woman-on-a-zero-waste-mission-in-the-us/ https://frenchly.us/bea-johnson-a-french-woman-on-a-zero-was... I guess she should get on television asap
- mattkrause 8y agoReusable tampons and condoms (from the article) might be a bridge too far for many people.
- agumonkey 8y agoOk, the docu I saw about her was mostly about kitchen habits: glass jars, a few tote bags and compost. I'm not pro-reusable condoms either.
- nameisu 8y agoi would like to know which African country gets dumped with all this waste
- dasanman 8y agoMaybe now americans will be more thoughtful
- jbob2000 8y agoGee, where is all this waste coming from? eats take out 3 times a day. I just have no idea how we can get better at recycling. buys a new smartphone every 2 years. Like why do we have to separate plastic and paper? drinks coffee from a disposable cup twice a day. I have no idea how Washington will meet 80% recycling targets! stocks house with consumer packaged goods. The plastic straw ban was a good start, but I'd like to see some more action on this front. My partner bought a box of crackers the other day and we opened it up to find half the cardboard box was empty and it was just a small plastic bag which itself was half empty. The packaging almost weighed more than the product itself! And I bought a microSD card the other day with a plastic clam shell package that was 15x the size of the product it was holding. Ridiculous. Consumerism has gone too far. Mandate that packaging can't weigh more than the product it holds and you'd eliminate tons of wasteful packaging. Mandate that all food must be sold in bulk quantities; no more single scoop yogurt cups or snack bags with like 3 gummies in them.
- EADGBE 8y agoThere's a warning on the box that says contents may settle during shipment. As far as having a box too large; well that's just settling for the box maker's specs. (Almost) No one makes their own boxes. I noticed Amazon starting shipping in frustration-free packaging. I'm quite a fan of that. Assuming it helps (if you compost the cardboard maybe?).
- jbob2000 8y agoI wasn't complaining about the lack of product, which is what the warning on the box is for (so people don't call up and say "hey you gave me a half filled bag!"). My complaint is that there is clearly an inefficiency in packaging which is leading to this waste. And again, my complaint with clam shells isn't that they are frustrating; it's that the product I purchased was far smaller than its packaging, again a huge packaging inefficiency which leads to waste. I'm not asking companies to make their own boxes or reduce frustration. I'm asking consumers to stop buying shit that comes in boxes and plastic. I didn't need those crackers, we could have happily snacked on homemade bread. Why couldn't the SD card come in a small dime bag in an envelope?
- grizzles 8y agoIt would be hard to find a better fit for a problem needing a ml / robotics solution.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoI'd like to remind the US of the creation of Keep America Beautiful. I was surprised to discover this was an early piece of corporate greenwashing in the 1950s[0]. Funded by Budweiser, Philip Morris, Coke and others to prevent Vermont bringing a mandatory deposit scheme in for single use packaging. How topical! Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality. Just by advertising at us to recycle and dispose of our (not that we created or requested it) rubbish carefully. [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recycling-wont-solve-plastic-pollution/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recyc...
- RobertRoberts 8y ago>*"Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality." Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, but are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?
- pkhagah 8y agoIt's not just about throwing garbage into trash can. The main question is about how much of garbage is being recycled? And who will pay for the recycling if you mandate 5 different types of garbage and mandate maximum possible recycling? Many of the European countries have major focus on percentage of garbage being recycled. Some countries even reached 70% or so and have plans to increase it even further.
- RobertRoberts 8y agoAgain, I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, it just seemed you were implying before that corporations hold some kind of responsibility to ensure trash doesn't end up on the ground. When in my (limited) experience, 99% of trash on the ground is from the public, while 99% of pollution of the water ways (edit: and landfills) is from corporations/industry/government. (1% being the exceptions, and these being made up numbers anyways...)
- usermac 8y agoThis is where capitalism trumps sustainability. A mistake was made.
- forkLding 8y agoBetter start educating people about cleaning out their plastic containers before recycling, even a bit of yogurt left at the bottom of a yogurt container can contaminate and can be possibly thrown out as garbage. Heads up to those who didn't know like me. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4606893 https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4606893
- polskibus 8y agoThat requires wasting water though. Maybe the container for yoghurt should be changed to be reusable after washing or recyclable without wasting resources on cleaning?
- lisper 8y ago> That requires wasting water though Yeah, this. This is the thing that most people who consider themselves environmentally conscious do not seem to have taken fully on board: there are no simple solutions here. There is an elephant in the room: there are simply too many human beings on the planet for them all to have a prosperous life style without enormous changes to the fundamental structure of the world's economy. Recycling will not save us. Better gas mileage will not save us. Electric cars will not save us. More public transit will not save us. The only thing that might save us is massive investment in nuclear power (plus solar and wind, but those two alone will not save us) plus a concerted effort to make birth control more widely available and socially acceptable.
- mgbmtl 8y agoThat's rather pessimistic. The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. There is no magic bullet.
- lisper 8y ago> That's rather pessimistic. Indeed. But it's also realistic. > The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. Applies to what? R-R-R will buy some time. It will not solve the problem in the long run. > There is no magic bullet. Yes, there is: birth control. The solution to the problem is to stop the underlying unsustainable process, which is the exponential growth in human population. That is the ONLY solution.
- makecheck 8y agoWhen I was a kid, the “bottle depot” was a very motivating way to go out of one’s way to collect stray bottles. Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).
- nojvek 8y agoThis * 1000. The way things work nowadays is the supermarket chain doesn’t pay the cost of polluting the planet. Every goddamn product is planed obsoletion so it can be cheap with a fat price margin and the customer has to keep on buying every couple of years. Charge supermarkets for plastics and pay customers to return recyclable things and that’s a huge motivator to reduce landfill garbage in half. I’m also a big believer that we need better robotics. When I saw Wall-E I just got super excited by seeing trash recycling robots. Robots should be doing stuff humans don’t do, not replacing them. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game.
- JimboOmega 8y agoThere are already some pretty impressive recycling robots, especially in the field of sorting out mixed recyclables (scanning the incoming stream and shooting stuff that matches certain parameters into a separate area). It's pretty cool, you should check it out. I don't know how economical they are but they still require human backup because of the sheer variety of (incorrect) crap put in recycling bins. You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans? Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense. Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.
- Atreus 8y agoThis shows an externality - that "Recycling" was really just a sham. Actual recycling has a cost overhead. I think this is a good thing. I think it will drive to actual recycling that does actual good, instead of, as China realistically called it "moving trash".
- craftyguy 8y ago> I think it will drive to actual recycling that does actual good I'm not so sure, at least in the US. Politicians almost always follow the path of least resistance when dealing with problems (our current system encourages it), and the shortest, least resistant path to making this problem disappear is to pay some other country to take it and do what they want with it (burn it, bury it, etc).
- delecti 8y ago> is to pay some other country to take it They tried that though. There's currently no "other country" willing to take it. That was Plan A, and it failed, it seems that Plan B is to just let it build up, but that won't last forever either.
- craftyguy 8y ago> There's currently no "other country" willing to take it. They just aren't offering them enough money.
- rapnie 8y agoHopeful news is that some really efficient recycling technologies for mixed plastics are under development, like Magnetic Density Separation (MDS) https://www.tudelft.nl/en/ceg/research/stories-of-science/recycling-refined/ https://www.tudelft.nl/en/ceg/research/stories-of-science/re...
- jobu 8y agoYears ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling. What I remember is that most people feel bad about throwing stuff away, so a big part of the recycling movement is based around guilt rather than facts. The slogan "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is in that order for a reason. Reducing the amount of what you use and reusing what you have is much more important and effective in helping the environment than recycling. Also putting things in a landfill really isn't really a problem. Landfills don't take up a significant amount of space, and when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment. As for the economics of recycling: * Recycling paper is a terrible idea. It takes a lot more chemicals, fuel and labor to recycle paper than produce new paper from trees (and it's a much lower quality product). Also, landfills are able to capture and sell the methane produced from paper as it decomposes, so it makes a lot more economical and environmental sense to just throw it away. * Recycling glass can be economical depending on the cost of natural gas because the melting point of glass is slightly lower than raw silica. Unfortunately recycling adds cost because of the sorting and cleaning. * Some plastics can't be made from recycled materials, and even when they can be, the economics of it depends on the cost of crude oil and natural gas. Prices for gas and oil fluctuate a lot, so it's risky for companies to be in the business of processing plastic back into feedstock because they don't know whether they will be able to sell it at or above cost at the time they're buying materials. * Aluminum is really the only commonly recycled material that makes 100% economic sense. It's really expensive to produce from ore, and cheap produce from recycled materials. EDIT: Found the episode here - https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/
- dv_dt 8y agoSome of these claims seem extraordinary, e.g. some casual googling seems to indicate that recycling paper is less chemical and energy intensive than new pulp... so do you have some specific research that supports these ideas, or does it all come from the P&T episode?
- sandworm101 8y agoYa, there are too many factors. Turning a pile of very ink-heavy newspapers into crisp white photocopier paper takes lots of chemicals. Turning it back into a 50% content for more newsprint isn't as much of a problem.
- pandasun 8y agoWhat would happen if we put trash in shipping containers and launch it into space? (Serious question).
- ryanmercer 8y agoYour garbage bill would could you about 10,000 USD per pound and require the use of obscene amounts of rocket fuel.
- pandasun 8y agoThank you for explaining.
- Kluny 8y agoI'm going to be pursuing a degree in Environmental Management with a specialty in Waste Management in Denmark next year. Really excited to be stepping away from software development and into this exciting and growing field :D
- satokema 8y agoFor an entertaining introduction (and some perspective) on the whole process of trash collection and recycling, I recommend _Trashed_ by Backderf. It's an eye-opener. Possibly a little exaggerated in parts, but just the basic farts are insane: all that stands between the gunk in the landfill and the soil system is a thin layer of plastic, usually.
- vondur 8y agoCan we not burn our trash like some of the Nordic countries currently do? Or would the EPA frown on something like that?
- ryanmercer 8y agoEven if we could, you're talking about a few hundred million tons of trash each year.
- mirimir 8y agoThis is just so bloody predictable. Recycling isn't a new thing. It's been common "forever" to recycle paper and metals. But you had to keep stuff separate: steel, copper, brass, newspaper, bond paper, etc. But to increase participation in modern consumer society, commingled "recycling" became the norm. And it just doesn't work. Broken glass makes paper useless, because it damages machines. And once commingled recyclables go through the collection process, with crushing and shearing, separation becomes virtually impossible. Anyway, the only hope is source separation. And that's problematic. Because most people don't want to bother. And because there are just too many categories. Too many kinds of plastics. Packaging with multiple layers, including paper, metal and plastic.
- samstave 8y agoThe real point I always see when looking at the problem is Packaging. Packaging should be required to be as literally minimal as actually possible, consuming the least amount of resources in every phase of the lifecycle as possible. Excessive packaging should be as illegal as it is immoral and anti-environmental. Inks, Paper, Plastic, Wraps, Ties, ALL of it should be as eliminated as possible. Think of the time, energy, resources (power, fuel, transport, machinery, engineering etc) all that has been put into the creation of waste.
- mirimir 8y agoI agree. Also, options for material usage ought to be limited. And one could require that every manufacturer accept return of all packaging. I'm old enough to remember when milk, beer and soda bottles were typically returned, washed and reused. The last time I lived in Mexico, that was still common, at least in some markets. But the other side of it is that modern packaging arguably reduces waste. Or at least, I've read that. Maybe it's BS.
- samstave 8y ago>But the other side of it is that modern packaging arguably reduces waste. Or at least, I've read that. Maybe it's BS. I find a good illustration on how this is not true is Christmas. Look at how much packaging waste is left over in your house alone from christmas. Now, thats consolidated to one day/event, but spread that out across billions of purchases and you can see that waste in packaging is still monumentally huge. On a % of waste for a widget, as compared to, perhaps the way packaging was previously made for a widget 20 years ago - perhaps its easy to make that argument that its less waste - but I doubt that as; The widgets today didnt exist then Everyone is trying to sell more and more widgets the widgets are made of more exotic and complex and numerous components etc..
- carapace 8y agoI've been steadily working towards trash collecting robots for several years now, ever since hearing about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After the initial shock wore off I thought to myself, "hey, free resources." The initial challenge was finding a secure OS to run on the robots so they wouldn't be suborned into a (physical) botnet. That proved challenging, as the only way you can trust your system is to prove it correct from the metal up. In order to be able to trust the proof you have to be able to understand symbolic logic. It turns out there's a simple notation that makes this easy[1] and which makes for a simple SAT solver. Combined with a logical-paradigm reasoning engine (i.e. Prolog or miniKanren or Coq, etc... There are a few to choose from these days) you can describe and compile e.g. a trustworthy OS and application code for a swarm robot distributed over the ocean. (I'm just at that point now. It's been slow going, I lead a chaotic life.) In the meantime the NN/ML renaissance hit and now a lot of what would have been hairy problems are already solved. I had thought to have some sort of volunteer "Mechanical Turk" network of humans to help sort the trash, but very effective sorting machines have become available in just the last few years. There are (at least) two major method of recycling plastic: Thermal depolymerization[2] which uses heat and pressure to turn it back into a kind of oil-like slurry; and Molten Salt Oxidation[3] which oxidizes (burns) molecules (not just plastic) within a red-hot bath of molten salt. This latter process can handle pretty much anything, it's used to dispose of munitions including chemical weapons. It's also exothermic, you can get power out. It also makes a good atomic reactor. There's another option that could be called "divide and conquer". What makes something a piece of "trash" rather than a building material? Uniformity of shape and material. Consider the "timbrel vault"[4]. The basic idea is to subdivide a piece of trash until it's more-or-less "pure" (glass, paper, plastic, whatever), record the shapes of the individual pieces, and then assemble them (by machine) into larger structures and glue them together. Because you would have precise control over the fine structure of the composite material output you could build non-linear structures (i.e. that bend or compress in one direction but are stiff in others, etc.) or reinforce weaker or more brittle materials with stronger bits. All this to say: "waste" is another word for "resource". Change your perspective and you change your level of wealth. And it's getting exponentially cheaper and easier to apply automated intelligence to rearrange the "waste" into useful forms! From this POV, China has done US a favor. [1] "Laws of Form" G. Spencer-Brown. Cf. "Markable Mark" G. Burnett-Stuart. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization [3] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/home.earthlink.net/bhoglund/whatsMoltenSal.html http://moltensalt.org/references/static/home.earthlink.net/b... [4] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/11/tiles-vaults.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/11/tiles-vaults.html
- Endama 8y agoIsn't there an argument here to build more incinerator-style power plants to manage the garbage buildup (esp. in urban centers?) To my knowledge, lots of European/Asian developed nations are already doing this with acceptable (i.e. low) environmental impact. Can someone more knowledgable comment on this?
- take_5 8y agoI'd love to see Amazon push for its suppliers to offer a low environmental impact packaging option. If you buy a camera on Amazon, the box isn't selling anything on Amazon, so you can use a basic recycled board box with minimal to no plastic for your new camera. Would select that option every time. I have opened my MacBook box since removing it from the box the first time. It may as well have been made out of lowest energy to produce and recycle material or something naturally biodegradable.