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Years 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 r

by jobu 8y ago

Years 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 ago
Some 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 ago
  Ya, 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.
  - werdnapk 8y ago
    Don't you think it takes a lot of chemicals to turn a piece of wood into crisp white paper? Hint: It does.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      Then don't subsidize recycling and let the market sort out which is cheaper.
      - londons_explore 8y ago
        Some costs of making new stuff aren't reflected in the market price. For example the CO2 cost of refining, or the pollution cost of the factory that makes it. Rather than tax CO2 or pollution, we instead prefer to subsidize recycling. Why? Dunno.
        SamReidHughes 8y ago
        Recycling has the same sort of costs. In the past year, I've been harmed more by the noise of the recycling truck than the total harm of pollution of manufacturing new materials I could have recycled.
      - jeffbax 8y ago
        I'm not sure its that simple, presumably part of the subsidy is that we want less physical mass/waste going into landfill so there's an argument to making recycling artificially cheap vs. making new stuff. While I am hopeful that at some point the market will come up with solutions to recycle material from landfill, I think plastic and carbon taxes still would have a place today (doing something about fishing nets would sure go a long way though…) specifically to help reduce the material burden (or nudge drinks to go back to more aluminum cans)
eugeniub 8y ago
> when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment. That's a bold statement I would love to see some sources for.
mrfredward 8y ago
>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. The price of natural gas has plummeted due to fracking. So much so, that nowadays it is often more economical for drillers to burn the methane off than to build the infrastructure to sell it. I expect the same economics apply to landfills. Plus, methane is 25x as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas (hence why it is better to burn methane than release it), so if capturing methane from landfills is at all less than perfect, decomposing paper products are still a significant environmental liability, not to mention an explosion risk. And that's just for paper, one of the most benign things you can throw away...
- ryacko 8y ago
  That has always been true. The incentive to capture methane never has been particularly high, given that transporting a gas is much more difficult than a bunch of unrefined liquids.
philipodonnell 8y ago
> 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. This is true in lots of industries that use hedging to control their exposure to commodity prices, why wouldn't that be true here?
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Paper only doesn't make sense to recycle if you externalize a lot of the costs. For example, what if we had to pay to put something in the garbage ... as we ultimately pay China? Then the equilibrium in the equation changes ...
- slavik81 8y ago
  I find it hard to believe the parent was failing to account for the cost of the landfill. It's the most obvious cost of that strategy, so it would be hard to miss. On a related topic, to know that the equilibrium changes, you'd need to know the difference in cost before and after accounting for the thing you added. This discussion would benefit significantly from careful analysis using actual numbers. If there's one thing that Bullshit! got right, it's that there are clear, empirical metrics we can use to evaluate solutions, and we should use them.
- lacker 8y ago
  I don't know where you live, but here in California I do pay for garbage services.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JTbane 8y ago
It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Or worse, tossing it into the ocean.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  > worse, tossing it into the ocean I used to think that. Then I read this and now I'm less sure: ....the most widely-used plastic, the stuff used to make shopping bags, is the one that produces the greatest amount of these warming gases ... after 212 days in the sun, this plastic emitted 176 times more methane than at the start of the experiment. Ironically, when plastics were exposed to air the amount of methane emitted was double the level from sea water. more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Plastics are basically forever. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and contaminate the environment (they've found commercially sold sea salt contaminated with micro-plastics). With the exception of the plastics that are biodegradable (expensive and extremely uncommon) and the ones that we've discovered worms can eat.
zerb 8y ago
I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.
- nordsieck 8y ago
  > how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum I doubt they care about anything on the aluminum at all. If you watch videos of people melting down soda cans into aluminum ingots [0], there is a lot of dross or non-aluminum material that needs to be removed. Since there is already a process in place to eliminate non-aluminum material, I wouldn't worry about a bit of food. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA
- jimrandomh 8y ago
  If it can be cleaned off by a kitchen sink, it can definitely be cleaned off by an industrial recycling facility.
  - vntok 8y ago
    Not necessarily. A kitchen sink might spend 3min cleaning one bottle where an industrial recycling facility won't have more than a 10s budget per bottle before that bottle be deemed either clean or meltable.
igivanov 8y ago
>glass In the good old USSR there was a limited number of sizes/styles of glass bottles and jars in circulation. Each one had a deposit value, and if it had no cracks/chips and all labels were removed, it could be returned for direct reuse, i.e. no melting and further manufacturing was involved. I think it worked OK since it had existed for many decades, and energy was cheap in those days.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  IIRC, that is also how they handle half liter beer bottles in places like Germany and Netherlands. As an American, I saw it and thought "Wow. That just makes so much sense. Why don't we do that?"
  - avar 8y ago
    Perhaps one reason is that those bottles, while completely functional, tend to look pretty rough and worn out after a while, it's obvious that they've been recycled and aren't new. Is that something a company wants to take a risk on when it comes to the psychology of consumer choice?
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      You can always take those too worn bottles and recycle that subset into shiny new bottles..
    - baq 8y ago
      Market the used ones as more valuable than new.
  - diggernet 8y ago
    It wasn't all that long ago we did. I remember in the mid-80's buying soda at the grocery store in 6-packs of glass bottles, and bringing the empty bottles back to the store for a discount when buying more. The empties were sent back to the bottling plant, washed, and refilled. It was really interesting seeing the branding variations, depending on the age of the bottle, on the store shelves. I still have a 60's-era 7-Up bottle that had been through around 20 years of reuse when I bought it.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
> Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling. I watched that episode and it was hardly a decent job. Penn is a staunch libertarian and that colors his presentation of the facts. Also, it is an entertainment show so they love to have something to yell "bullshit" at. There is no nuance. For sure, in the zeal to increase recycling percentage, it was a huge mistake for cities which used to collect sorted recyclables to have a "single stream" recycling flow to make it easier for people to "recycle". No argument there. Something that shouldn't be discounted is that it seems like a relatively simple problem to have NN image classifiers to sort the stream of waste. It doesn't need to be 99% accurate at all -- it is better that it can classify 90% of the items with near 100% accuracy and just throw away the 10% it isn't sure about, resulting in more pure recycling streams.
jinushaun 8y ago
What bothers me is melting a glass bottle of wine to produce a new glass bottle of wine. Just remove the label and refill the same bottle with different wine! Recycling should be the last resort.
- jesseb 8y ago
  I've seen a few microbreweries re-using bottles lately, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Gives them a bit of character as a bonus too, lots will have scuffs and other markings on them from previous use/transport.
  - Arnt 8y ago
    This is how German beer and much else works. Most beer, milk and bottled water is sold in one of about ten shapes of bottle. Four kinds for milk (two sizes two colours), one for water, three for beer, some lesser used that I've forgotten right now, and IIRC the market percentage for these things is 65% at the moment. I'm sure someone will follow up to explain how horrible the situation is and all about those other 35%, but compared to the US or India it's pretty good.
    - dheral 8y ago
      To be pedantic, there are three shapes of glass bottles for mineral water. A green one for medium sparkling, white for classic sparkling and a fancy one for the hipster water.
- rficcaglia 8y ago
  This. In Greece, Italy and Spain (likely elsewhere but these I have seen first hand, and never in the US of A) there are corner markets that sell very good wine from big barrels or stainless steel vats. you can buy or bring your own reusable containers, glass or plastic or whatever. the problem is too much packaging of any kind. Buy small and local. Much more sustainable.
baq 8y ago
Are you taking about dollar expensive or Joule expensive? You can easily tweak ROI as a regulator by taxing but EORI is technology and physics limited.

by jobu 8y ago

dv_dt 8y ago

Some 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 ago
Ya, 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.
- werdnapk 8y ago
  Don't you think it takes a lot of chemicals to turn a piece of wood into crisp white paper? Hint: It does.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    Then don't subsidize recycling and let the market sort out which is cheaper.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      Some costs of making new stuff aren't reflected in the market price. For example the CO2 cost of refining, or the pollution cost of the factory that makes it. Rather than tax CO2 or pollution, we instead prefer to subsidize recycling. Why? Dunno.
      - SamReidHughes 8y ago
        Recycling has the same sort of costs. In the past year, I've been harmed more by the noise of the recycling truck than the total harm of pollution of manufacturing new materials I could have recycled.
    - jeffbax 8y ago
      I'm not sure its that simple, presumably part of the subsidy is that we want less physical mass/waste going into landfill so there's an argument to making recycling artificially cheap vs. making new stuff. While I am hopeful that at some point the market will come up with solutions to recycle material from landfill, I think plastic and carbon taxes still would have a place today (doing something about fishing nets would sure go a long way though…) specifically to help reduce the material burden (or nudge drinks to go back to more aluminum cans)

eugeniub 8y ago

> when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment. That's a bold statement I would love to see some sources for.

mrfredward 8y ago

>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. The price of natural gas has plummeted due to fracking. So much so, that nowadays it is often more economical for drillers to burn the methane off than to build the infrastructure to sell it. I expect the same economics apply to landfills. Plus, methane is 25x as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas (hence why it is better to burn methane than release it), so if capturing methane from landfills is at all less than perfect, decomposing paper products are still a significant environmental liability, not to mention an explosion risk. And that's just for paper, one of the most benign things you can throw away...

ryacko 8y ago
That has always been true. The incentive to capture methane never has been particularly high, given that transporting a gas is much more difficult than a bunch of unrefined liquids.

philipodonnell 8y ago

> 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. This is true in lots of industries that use hedging to control their exposure to commodity prices, why wouldn't that be true here?

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Paper only doesn't make sense to recycle if you externalize a lot of the costs. For example, what if we had to pay to put something in the garbage ... as we ultimately pay China? Then the equilibrium in the equation changes ...

slavik81 8y ago
I find it hard to believe the parent was failing to account for the cost of the landfill. It's the most obvious cost of that strategy, so it would be hard to miss. On a related topic, to know that the equilibrium changes, you'd need to know the difference in cost before and after accounting for the thing you added. This discussion would benefit significantly from careful analysis using actual numbers. If there's one thing that Bullshit! got right, it's that there are clear, empirical metrics we can use to evaluate solutions, and we should use them.
lacker 8y ago
I don't know where you live, but here in California I do pay for garbage services.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

JTbane 8y ago

It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Or worse, tossing it into the ocean.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
> worse, tossing it into the ocean I used to think that. Then I read this and now I'm less sure: ....the most widely-used plastic, the stuff used to make shopping bags, is the one that produces the greatest amount of these warming gases ... after 212 days in the sun, this plastic emitted 176 times more methane than at the start of the experiment. Ironically, when plastics were exposed to air the amount of methane emitted was double the level from sea water. more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989
ryanmercer 8y ago
>It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Plastics are basically forever. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and contaminate the environment (they've found commercially sold sea salt contaminated with micro-plastics). With the exception of the plastics that are biodegradable (expensive and extremely uncommon) and the ones that we've discovered worms can eat.

zerb 8y ago

I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.

nordsieck 8y ago
> how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum I doubt they care about anything on the aluminum at all. If you watch videos of people melting down soda cans into aluminum ingots [0], there is a lot of dross or non-aluminum material that needs to be removed. Since there is already a process in place to eliminate non-aluminum material, I wouldn't worry about a bit of food. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA
jimrandomh 8y ago
If it can be cleaned off by a kitchen sink, it can definitely be cleaned off by an industrial recycling facility.
- vntok 8y ago
  Not necessarily. A kitchen sink might spend 3min cleaning one bottle where an industrial recycling facility won't have more than a 10s budget per bottle before that bottle be deemed either clean or meltable.

igivanov 8y ago

>glass In the good old USSR there was a limited number of sizes/styles of glass bottles and jars in circulation. Each one had a deposit value, and if it had no cracks/chips and all labels were removed, it could be returned for direct reuse, i.e. no melting and further manufacturing was involved. I think it worked OK since it had existed for many decades, and energy was cheap in those days.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
IIRC, that is also how they handle half liter beer bottles in places like Germany and Netherlands. As an American, I saw it and thought "Wow. That just makes so much sense. Why don't we do that?"
- avar 8y ago
  Perhaps one reason is that those bottles, while completely functional, tend to look pretty rough and worn out after a while, it's obvious that they've been recycled and aren't new. Is that something a company wants to take a risk on when it comes to the psychology of consumer choice?
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    You can always take those too worn bottles and recycle that subset into shiny new bottles..
  - baq 8y ago
    Market the used ones as more valuable than new.
- diggernet 8y ago
  It wasn't all that long ago we did. I remember in the mid-80's buying soda at the grocery store in 6-packs of glass bottles, and bringing the empty bottles back to the store for a discount when buying more. The empties were sent back to the bottling plant, washed, and refilled. It was really interesting seeing the branding variations, depending on the age of the bottle, on the store shelves. I still have a 60's-era 7-Up bottle that had been through around 20 years of reuse when I bought it.

tasty_freeze 8y ago

> Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling. I watched that episode and it was hardly a decent job. Penn is a staunch libertarian and that colors his presentation of the facts. Also, it is an entertainment show so they love to have something to yell "bullshit" at. There is no nuance. For sure, in the zeal to increase recycling percentage, it was a huge mistake for cities which used to collect sorted recyclables to have a "single stream" recycling flow to make it easier for people to "recycle". No argument there. Something that shouldn't be discounted is that it seems like a relatively simple problem to have NN image classifiers to sort the stream of waste. It doesn't need to be 99% accurate at all -- it is better that it can classify 90% of the items with near 100% accuracy and just throw away the 10% it isn't sure about, resulting in more pure recycling streams.

jinushaun 8y ago

What bothers me is melting a glass bottle of wine to produce a new glass bottle of wine. Just remove the label and refill the same bottle with different wine! Recycling should be the last resort.

jesseb 8y ago
I've seen a few microbreweries re-using bottles lately, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Gives them a bit of character as a bonus too, lots will have scuffs and other markings on them from previous use/transport.
- Arnt 8y ago
  This is how German beer and much else works. Most beer, milk and bottled water is sold in one of about ten shapes of bottle. Four kinds for milk (two sizes two colours), one for water, three for beer, some lesser used that I've forgotten right now, and IIRC the market percentage for these things is 65% at the moment. I'm sure someone will follow up to explain how horrible the situation is and all about those other 35%, but compared to the US or India it's pretty good.
  - dheral 8y ago
    To be pedantic, there are three shapes of glass bottles for mineral water. A green one for medium sparkling, white for classic sparkling and a fancy one for the hipster water.
rficcaglia 8y ago
This. In Greece, Italy and Spain (likely elsewhere but these I have seen first hand, and never in the US of A) there are corner markets that sell very good wine from big barrels or stainless steel vats. you can buy or bring your own reusable containers, glass or plastic or whatever. the problem is too much packaging of any kind. Buy small and local. Much more sustainable.

baq 8y ago

Are you taking about dollar expensive or Joule expensive? You can easily tweak ROI as a regulator by taxing but EORI is technology and physics limited.