11 ms·

Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble. How does it work?

99 points by nikbackm 8y ago

paulcole 8y ago
I really don’t see the point of recycling. These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce my impact on the planet: eating a plant-based diet, never traveling by plane and only rarely by car (I never learned to drive and the vast majority of my travel during the year is by bicycle, public transit or foot), never having kids, and living in a small apartment. Does separating my glass and plastic jars really make that much of an additional difference?
- nrb 8y ago
  I think never traveling beyond a 30-mile radius is more detrimental to society as a whole than an occasional flight. After all, a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 which can at least mitigate that impact.
  - justinator 8y ago
    > I think never traveling beyond a 30-mile radius is more detrimental to society as a whole than an occasional flight You know when you travel by plane, you fly over most of the terrain you might have encountered if you took a bicycle? What's more detrimental now? Twain wrote, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." But read his books, and you'll see how he traveled: slowly. > a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      Walking across the United States is a slightly-uncommon and somewhat historic hobby. It can be done in under 300 days.
    - nrb 8y ago
      I was referring to cultures experienced and perspective gained more than terrain covered. Most people today cannot afford to travel as slowly as he had the great fortune of doing. I agree that a carbon offset doesn't absolve you of responsibility, but like everything in life, it's tradeoffs.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      > You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that. What's so complicated about "tax people that produce CO2, pay people that capture CO2"?
  - usaar333 8y ago
    > After all, a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 which can at least mitigate that impact. That uses an offset price of $7/ton, which seems rather low. Otherwise, offsetting the world's emissions would be only about $200b a year (.2% of world economy)
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      $10 per ticket, not per plane.
      - usaar333 8y ago
        I'm using 1.5 tons/ticket. Source: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        You're right, I got the wrong number.
        nrb 8y ago
        That site appears to be changing tons per ticket based on flight class to try to capture a higher donation.
        usaar333 8y ago
        That's simply because higher classes occupy more space and thus proportionately are responsible for a higher percent of emissions. https://www.myclimate.org/fileadmin/myc/files_myc_perf/12_flight_calculator_documentation_EN.pdf https://www.myclimate.org/fileadmin/myc/files_myc_perf/12_fl...
    - nrb 8y ago
      I pulled that number from http://co2offsets.sustainabletravelinternational.org/ua/offsets http://co2offsets.sustainabletravelinternational.org/ua/offs... which takes into account origin and destination, any additional legs, and month of the year. SFO -> JFK direct round-trip in July for about 0.9 metric tons
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Your steps go far beyond what most people do. However, the real significance is at the macro level. It's not about what individuals do, it's about the systematic effects. Our system today wouldn't function at all if everyone acted like you (I'm not saying it would be bad! We probably should have a totally different system that would work for far more people living your way). The real issue with consumption and waste-disposal lies with the patterns in the economy that encourage the creation of disposable products in the first place. All that said, recycling can still be positive if done right. ANd separating glass and plastic etc. would be trivial if the producers of goods were set up more to make it as easy as possible.
- cc439 8y ago
  There really hasn't been any point to recycling paper, plastic, and glass for quite some time now. Recycling glass hasn't made sense ever since local bottling plants ceased to exist in most cities, removing the system by which they were able to re-use recycled bottles. Recycling paper is obviously no longer a sensible activity given the issues of contamination and lack of economic incentives given just how cheap sustainably harvested wood has become. Plastic, well plastic would make sense if we could ever figure out how to sort all the different types automatically. The re-use of recycled plastic is basically limited to a handful of common product types (plastic bottles that are either HDPE or PET and easily identifiable as such). That said, one should always make an effort to recycle aluminum properly. There's a reason aluminum is often referred to as "solidified electricity" and it's because it takes enormous amounts of energy to extract aluminum from raw ore. Recycling finished aluminum goods cuts out that entire step of the production chain and has an enormous impact on large-scale energy consumption.
  - marmadukester39 8y ago
    WHY cant we just standardize on bottle/cup size/shape? Just use different labels.
  - lurquer 8y ago
    Recycling is a way to profit off of virtue signaling. Why should I separate my trash to make some recycling company more profitable? If they pay me enough, I might do it. Otherwise, it's all going into the landfill. Even aluminum. If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough -- they can go dig it up. I dislike companies making profits on forced labor. Too many virtue-signaling municipalities mandate recycling (and sometimes even charges you for pickup) just so some recycling company can increase its bottom line. Nonsense. Bury everything. It's cheap.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      What's the pejorative term for when you brag that you just don't give a fuck?
    - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
- mratzloff 8y ago
  It's easy to reclaim glass and aluminum. In my apartment, it's a matter of setting out a bag every week or so.
- mlinksva 8y ago
  Thank you for what you do (and do not). My guess is recycling doesn't make much of an additional difference. There's a reason it's third in reduce-reuse-recycle. I separate out recyclables mostly out of habit (and garbage service bin for recycling is much larger than than one for garbage) but I wonder whether recycling could be a net negative due to moral exhaustion/fatigue/substitution -- surely there is research on this, and I would love pointers to it.
- beerlord 8y ago
  If you’re not going to have kids, there will simply be fewer people next generation who will share your concerns about the environment. If you absolutely want to minimize your environmental impact to the extent that you think reproducing is pointless, isn’t the logical end result to immediately commit suicide as well?
yodon 8y ago
When my kids were young, they went on a field trip to a recycling plant. As a parent, the most interesting discovery was the sorting facility we visited didn't sort plastic by type because you can't expect people earning minimum wage to sort LDPE from HDPE from etc. So what did the big commercial recycling facility do? They sorted plastic by shape. Things shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as trash, things not shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as recyclable. It was pretty clear at that point recycling plastic was just a for show activity.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  But plastic is effectively recycled in lots of places in the world. Just because that plant sucked it doesn't mean all do. Add to that the commercial plastic waste, pallet wrap for instance is already separated when it is sold to the recyclers. Better than all that of course is re-use. When I was a child, in the UK, large glass bottles of lemonade had a 20p deposit, refundable on return. I believe I believe it is still common in Germany. This went away in the UK because large super-markets didn't want the hassle of dealing with returns, IIRC
  - ianai 8y ago
    I’d like to see fewer plastic items all around. There’s no reason a store must sell me a container in addition to the goods I buy.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      It complicates transportation to sell all goods in bulk. I'm glad that stores don't charge an extra 1.5 cents for the plastic bag around every gallon of milk and pound of rice. You, yourself, might have enough responsibility and self-control to prioritize cleaning your containers, but this is not true for all humans. The store would lose business if their competitor sold milk already in bags or boxes, but you had to bring your own milk bag to their store. And someone's bags might have bacterial or other contaminants and get them sick, then they blame the store and get the health department to shut them down. (Tangent: Why is most milk still sold in boxes, and not in plastic?) Glass is fragile, metals cause unexpected chemical reactions, wood is permeable & requires additional materials (wax, glue) to seal properly, and cardboard has poor durability.
tomohawk 8y ago
China's just not a reliable trading partner. They use trade as a weapon. It's got countries such as Malaysia reconsidering their interactions. http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-for-dealing-with-china/ http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-for-... That's too bad, as the Chinese people are industrious and creative, and together we stand a better chance of making the best use of waste.
- 08-15 8y ago
  Might be China is just tired of buying waste. Yes, waste, not "recyclables". Even if plastic and paper were clean and perfectly sorted by type, you still couldn't really recycle them like you can recycle metals and glass. It's always downcycling.
  - fspeech 8y ago
    Another reason is that China wants its domestic recycling (meaning curbside collection) industry to develop. While the processing industry can get cheaper input through importing, it lessens the interest in collecting domestic sources, generating more pollution or waste for the landfills.
Iwan-Zotow 8y ago
Wrong title. Should be "Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble. How it doesn't work"
- rasz 8y ago
  Wrong title. Should be "Pretending to Recycle while shipping garbage to China wont work any longer"
Animats 8y ago
Automated recycling is coming along well. Here's a typical modern plant in the UK.[1] Sorting is mechanized, with tumble drums, vibratory sorters, and magnets doing most of the work. Permanent magnets pull ferrous metal out. AC magnets pull aluminum out. Vision systems, often multispectral, look at the presorted materials as they go by on a fast belt and use air jets to kick out certain types of items. This is standard technology. There's still some manual picking involved in most plants. Robots are taking that over at a few plants.[2] Aluminum is the moneymaker. Plastic bottles can go to a plant that turns them back into pellets for making new bottles.[3] A huge plant now serves southern California. Not clear this makes money. Waste paper isn't that valuable. "Peak paper" was a while back, and US paper mills have been closing for years. It's not that sorting is hard, it's that the product is so low-value. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > Waste paper isn't that valuable. Plain white office paper might not be so valuable, but cardboard remains valuable enough that in Eastern Europe you can see marginalized communities like the Roma collecting it daily. I have seen recycling centers advertise payments like 0.50€/kg in exchange for cardboard, which seems pretty high.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  We still burn tens of millions of tonnes of essentially recyclable material that isn't recycled thanks to market prices. The burning isn't relevant (it's better than landfill in a lot of circumstances), it's that introducing virgin materials to the waste pool is cheaper than reuse, for many materials.
novia 8y ago
For anyone wondering why China doesn't want our plastics any more, here's a nice documentary: https://youtu.be/ooRVhRt1p54 https://youtu.be/ooRVhRt1p54
- gl00pp 8y ago
  Shit Son, that was real. I have always thought that recycling is a scam. That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals. But everyone is caught up in the feel goodness and if you don't you're some kind of animal. I say put everything in the landfill, we will one day harvest it and all that resource will be in one place!
  - ars 8y ago
    > That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals. Only metal (all metals). Recycled Glass is worthless, and is crushed and used as landfill cover.
zengid 8y ago
That trash smells like opportunity https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/an-uber-for-garbage-picks-up-steam-and-11-7-million-in-series-a-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/an-uber-for-garbage-picks-...
grecy 8y ago
It's worth remembering Recycling is the least good thing we should be doing. 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle I always find it interesting in developing countries to see tons and tons of stuff being reused, way more than in Developed countries. i.e. A 1 liter beer bottle in Ecuador is $0.75 for the beer, and $1 deposit on the glass. The bottles are cleaned and reused hundreds of times.
- orev 8y ago
  Yes, by far! Everyone fixated on recycling because it was the only option that didn’t require people to make real changes in their lives (and it’s amazing how much resistance there is/was to simply putting things in a few different bins). Now that China has decided to no longer be the world’s garbage dump, those chickens are going to come home to roost real quick.
- peterburkimsher 8y ago
  I'm very disappointed that in France, it's illegal to take things out of a déchetterie (scrapyard). They have fences and video cameras, and report offenders to the police. The policies are actively hostile to repairing and reusing old products, e.g. computers, printers.
- intended 8y ago
  But dont forget developing countries also USE less. Eventually when their standard of living improves, so will their consumption. In any scenario, homo economicus will weigh the cost of reusing something, vs the convenience of using that mental space and time for something else which makes him/her happier. If the convenience is high enough, people will switch to the other product. This doesnt happen now, because costs are still prohibitive. But do note, that in India they pioneered the single use plastic package for clothing detergents. So now where people sold a whole box of detergent, there are now thousands upon thousands of plastic detergent sachets.
garyrichardson 8y ago
Why not push the burden back onto the companies providing the goods in packages? If Walmart (or it's suppliers) had to prepay for the handling of the waste the products they sell come in you'd probably see a significant reduction in packaging.
- rapnie 8y ago
  In The Netherlands we had a Packaging Tax for supermarkets for a while (it has been repealed after a short time, because of resistance and lobbying). I liked the idea, except there was a problem (IMHO) in how it was implemented, because there was no requirement to show the tax amount that was charged to the consumer on their receipt. If your receipt would say e.g. 'Groceries $30.00, Plastic tax: $2.05' then a consumer would have a real incentive to lower the amount of tax by choosing better packaging with less plastic.
vinni2 8y ago
Just wondering why burning it to produce energy isn’t considered in US. Many countries like Sweden have managed to completely get rid of garbage this way [0]. [0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-out-of-garbage-imports-from-other-countries/article16795374.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-out-...
rapjr9 8y ago
What is holding back plasma gasification? https://waste-management-world.com/a/plasma-gasification-clean-renewable-fuel-through-vaporization-of-waste https://waste-management-world.com/a/plasma-gasification-cle...

99 points by nikbackm 8y ago

I really don’t see the point of recycling. These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce my impact on the planet: eating a plant-based diet, never traveling by plane and only rarely by car (I never learned to drive and the vast majority of my travel during the year is by bicycle, public transit or foot), never having kids, and living in a small apartment. Does separating my glass and plastic jars really make that much of an additional difference?

nrb 8y ago
I think never traveling beyond a 30-mile radius is more detrimental to society as a whole than an occasional flight. After all, a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 which can at least mitigate that impact.
- justinator 8y ago
  > I think never traveling beyond a 30-mile radius is more detrimental to society as a whole than an occasional flight You know when you travel by plane, you fly over most of the terrain you might have encountered if you took a bicycle? What's more detrimental now? Twain wrote, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." But read his books, and you'll see how he traveled: slowly. > a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Walking across the United States is a slightly-uncommon and somewhat historic hobby. It can be done in under 300 days.
  - nrb 8y ago
    I was referring to cultures experienced and perspective gained more than terrain covered. Most people today cannot afford to travel as slowly as he had the great fortune of doing. I agree that a carbon offset doesn't absolve you of responsibility, but like everything in life, it's tradeoffs.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    > You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that. What's so complicated about "tax people that produce CO2, pay people that capture CO2"?
- usaar333 8y ago
  > After all, a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 which can at least mitigate that impact. That uses an offset price of $7/ton, which seems rather low. Otherwise, offsetting the world's emissions would be only about $200b a year (.2% of world economy)
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    $10 per ticket, not per plane.
    - usaar333 8y ago
      I'm using 1.5 tons/ticket. Source: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        You're right, I got the wrong number.
      - nrb 8y ago
        That site appears to be changing tons per ticket based on flight class to try to capture a higher donation.
        usaar333 8y ago
        That's simply because higher classes occupy more space and thus proportionately are responsible for a higher percent of emissions. https://www.myclimate.org/fileadmin/myc/files_myc_perf/12_flight_calculator_documentation_EN.pdf https://www.myclimate.org/fileadmin/myc/files_myc_perf/12_fl...
  - nrb 8y ago
    I pulled that number from http://co2offsets.sustainabletravelinternational.org/ua/offsets http://co2offsets.sustainabletravelinternational.org/ua/offs... which takes into account origin and destination, any additional legs, and month of the year. SFO -> JFK direct round-trip in July for about 0.9 metric tons
quadrangle 8y ago
Your steps go far beyond what most people do. However, the real significance is at the macro level. It's not about what individuals do, it's about the systematic effects. Our system today wouldn't function at all if everyone acted like you (I'm not saying it would be bad! We probably should have a totally different system that would work for far more people living your way). The real issue with consumption and waste-disposal lies with the patterns in the economy that encourage the creation of disposable products in the first place. All that said, recycling can still be positive if done right. ANd separating glass and plastic etc. would be trivial if the producers of goods were set up more to make it as easy as possible.
cc439 8y ago
There really hasn't been any point to recycling paper, plastic, and glass for quite some time now. Recycling glass hasn't made sense ever since local bottling plants ceased to exist in most cities, removing the system by which they were able to re-use recycled bottles. Recycling paper is obviously no longer a sensible activity given the issues of contamination and lack of economic incentives given just how cheap sustainably harvested wood has become. Plastic, well plastic would make sense if we could ever figure out how to sort all the different types automatically. The re-use of recycled plastic is basically limited to a handful of common product types (plastic bottles that are either HDPE or PET and easily identifiable as such). That said, one should always make an effort to recycle aluminum properly. There's a reason aluminum is often referred to as "solidified electricity" and it's because it takes enormous amounts of energy to extract aluminum from raw ore. Recycling finished aluminum goods cuts out that entire step of the production chain and has an enormous impact on large-scale energy consumption.
- marmadukester39 8y ago
  WHY cant we just standardize on bottle/cup size/shape? Just use different labels.
- lurquer 8y ago
  Recycling is a way to profit off of virtue signaling. Why should I separate my trash to make some recycling company more profitable? If they pay me enough, I might do it. Otherwise, it's all going into the landfill. Even aluminum. If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough -- they can go dig it up. I dislike companies making profits on forced labor. Too many virtue-signaling municipalities mandate recycling (and sometimes even charges you for pickup) just so some recycling company can increase its bottom line. Nonsense. Bury everything. It's cheap.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    What's the pejorative term for when you brag that you just don't give a fuck?
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
mratzloff 8y ago
It's easy to reclaim glass and aluminum. In my apartment, it's a matter of setting out a bag every week or so.
mlinksva 8y ago
Thank you for what you do (and do not). My guess is recycling doesn't make much of an additional difference. There's a reason it's third in reduce-reuse-recycle. I separate out recyclables mostly out of habit (and garbage service bin for recycling is much larger than than one for garbage) but I wonder whether recycling could be a net negative due to moral exhaustion/fatigue/substitution -- surely there is research on this, and I would love pointers to it.
beerlord 8y ago
If you’re not going to have kids, there will simply be fewer people next generation who will share your concerns about the environment. If you absolutely want to minimize your environmental impact to the extent that you think reproducing is pointless, isn’t the logical end result to immediately commit suicide as well?

yodon 8y ago

When my kids were young, they went on a field trip to a recycling plant. As a parent, the most interesting discovery was the sorting facility we visited didn't sort plastic by type because you can't expect people earning minimum wage to sort LDPE from HDPE from etc. So what did the big commercial recycling facility do? They sorted plastic by shape. Things shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as trash, things not shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as recyclable. It was pretty clear at that point recycling plastic was just a for show activity.

jimnotgym 8y ago
But plastic is effectively recycled in lots of places in the world. Just because that plant sucked it doesn't mean all do. Add to that the commercial plastic waste, pallet wrap for instance is already separated when it is sold to the recyclers. Better than all that of course is re-use. When I was a child, in the UK, large glass bottles of lemonade had a 20p deposit, refundable on return. I believe I believe it is still common in Germany. This went away in the UK because large super-markets didn't want the hassle of dealing with returns, IIRC
- ianai 8y ago
  I’d like to see fewer plastic items all around. There’s no reason a store must sell me a container in addition to the goods I buy.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    It complicates transportation to sell all goods in bulk. I'm glad that stores don't charge an extra 1.5 cents for the plastic bag around every gallon of milk and pound of rice. You, yourself, might have enough responsibility and self-control to prioritize cleaning your containers, but this is not true for all humans. The store would lose business if their competitor sold milk already in bags or boxes, but you had to bring your own milk bag to their store. And someone's bags might have bacterial or other contaminants and get them sick, then they blame the store and get the health department to shut them down. (Tangent: Why is most milk still sold in boxes, and not in plastic?) Glass is fragile, metals cause unexpected chemical reactions, wood is permeable & requires additional materials (wax, glue) to seal properly, and cardboard has poor durability.

tomohawk 8y ago

China's just not a reliable trading partner. They use trade as a weapon. It's got countries such as Malaysia reconsidering their interactions. http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-for-dealing-with-china/ http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-for-... That's too bad, as the Chinese people are industrious and creative, and together we stand a better chance of making the best use of waste.

08-15 8y ago
Might be China is just tired of buying waste. Yes, waste, not "recyclables". Even if plastic and paper were clean and perfectly sorted by type, you still couldn't really recycle them like you can recycle metals and glass. It's always downcycling.
- fspeech 8y ago
  Another reason is that China wants its domestic recycling (meaning curbside collection) industry to develop. While the processing industry can get cheaper input through importing, it lessens the interest in collecting domestic sources, generating more pollution or waste for the landfills.

Iwan-Zotow 8y ago

Wrong title. Should be "Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble. How it doesn't work"

rasz 8y ago
Wrong title. Should be "Pretending to Recycle while shipping garbage to China wont work any longer"

Animats 8y ago

Automated recycling is coming along well. Here's a typical modern plant in the UK.[1] Sorting is mechanized, with tumble drums, vibratory sorters, and magnets doing most of the work. Permanent magnets pull ferrous metal out. AC magnets pull aluminum out. Vision systems, often multispectral, look at the presorted materials as they go by on a fast belt and use air jets to kick out certain types of items. This is standard technology. There's still some manual picking involved in most plants. Robots are taking that over at a few plants.[2] Aluminum is the moneymaker. Plastic bottles can go to a plant that turns them back into pellets for making new bottles.[3] A huge plant now serves southern California. Not clear this makes money. Waste paper isn't that valuable. "Peak paper" was a while back, and US paper mills have been closing for years. It's not that sorting is hard, it's that the product is so low-value. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> Waste paper isn't that valuable. Plain white office paper might not be so valuable, but cardboard remains valuable enough that in Eastern Europe you can see marginalized communities like the Roma collecting it daily. I have seen recycling centers advertise payments like 0.50€/kg in exchange for cardboard, which seems pretty high.
oliwarner 8y ago
We still burn tens of millions of tonnes of essentially recyclable material that isn't recycled thanks to market prices. The burning isn't relevant (it's better than landfill in a lot of circumstances), it's that introducing virgin materials to the waste pool is cheaper than reuse, for many materials.

novia 8y ago

For anyone wondering why China doesn't want our plastics any more, here's a nice documentary: https://youtu.be/ooRVhRt1p54 https://youtu.be/ooRVhRt1p54

gl00pp 8y ago
Shit Son, that was real. I have always thought that recycling is a scam. That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals. But everyone is caught up in the feel goodness and if you don't you're some kind of animal. I say put everything in the landfill, we will one day harvest it and all that resource will be in one place!
- ars 8y ago
  > That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals. Only metal (all metals). Recycled Glass is worthless, and is crushed and used as landfill cover.

zengid 8y ago

That trash smells like opportunity https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/an-uber-for-garbage-picks-up-steam-and-11-7-million-in-series-a-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/an-uber-for-garbage-picks-...

grecy 8y ago

It's worth remembering Recycling is the least good thing we should be doing. 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle I always find it interesting in developing countries to see tons and tons of stuff being reused, way more than in Developed countries. i.e. A 1 liter beer bottle in Ecuador is $0.75 for the beer, and $1 deposit on the glass. The bottles are cleaned and reused hundreds of times.

orev 8y ago
Yes, by far! Everyone fixated on recycling because it was the only option that didn’t require people to make real changes in their lives (and it’s amazing how much resistance there is/was to simply putting things in a few different bins). Now that China has decided to no longer be the world’s garbage dump, those chickens are going to come home to roost real quick.
peterburkimsher 8y ago
I'm very disappointed that in France, it's illegal to take things out of a déchetterie (scrapyard). They have fences and video cameras, and report offenders to the police. The policies are actively hostile to repairing and reusing old products, e.g. computers, printers.
intended 8y ago
But dont forget developing countries also USE less. Eventually when their standard of living improves, so will their consumption. In any scenario, homo economicus will weigh the cost of reusing something, vs the convenience of using that mental space and time for something else which makes him/her happier. If the convenience is high enough, people will switch to the other product. This doesnt happen now, because costs are still prohibitive. But do note, that in India they pioneered the single use plastic package for clothing detergents. So now where people sold a whole box of detergent, there are now thousands upon thousands of plastic detergent sachets.

garyrichardson 8y ago

Why not push the burden back onto the companies providing the goods in packages? If Walmart (or it's suppliers) had to prepay for the handling of the waste the products they sell come in you'd probably see a significant reduction in packaging.

rapnie 8y ago
In The Netherlands we had a Packaging Tax for supermarkets for a while (it has been repealed after a short time, because of resistance and lobbying). I liked the idea, except there was a problem (IMHO) in how it was implemented, because there was no requirement to show the tax amount that was charged to the consumer on their receipt. If your receipt would say e.g. 'Groceries $30.00, Plastic tax: $2.05' then a consumer would have a real incentive to lower the amount of tax by choosing better packaging with less plastic.

vinni2 8y ago

Just wondering why burning it to produce energy isn’t considered in US. Many countries like Sweden have managed to completely get rid of garbage this way [0]. [0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-out-of-garbage-imports-from-other-countries/article16795374.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-out-...

rapjr9 8y ago

What is holding back plasma gasification? https://waste-management-world.com/a/plasma-gasification-clean-renewable-fuel-through-vaporization-of-waste https://waste-management-world.com/a/plasma-gasification-cle...