3 ms·

Or a carbon tax! Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air than making it new, and so would incentivize recycling more.

• ars 8y ago
  > Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air than making it new I'm pretty sure it doesn't. If it did recycled products would be cheaper than new, but they aren't. It depends a lot on how much free labor AKA consumer pre-sorting you get though. Countries where this is seen as normal and expected have workable recycling.
  • mc32 8y ago
    While things hsve improved greatly in recycling, there was a time in Germany where people were asked to diligently sort their waste, the recycling companies were caught simply incinerating or dumping to foreign garbage markets. It looked like it worked, people thought they were being good citizens to learn years later it was a scam of sorts.
    • chimeracoder 8y ago
      > While things hsve improved greatly in recycling, there was a time in Germany where people were asked to diligently sort their waste, the recycling companies were caught simply incinerating or dumping to foreign garbage markets. It looked like it worked, people thought they were being good citizens to learn years later it was a scam of sorts. That's not in the past; it still happens across Europe. A lot of "recycling" is actually just shifting carbon emissions from Europe to developing nations.
• 0xfeba 8y ago
  > Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air I don't think this is the case for a few things... paper, cardboard, etc. Metals are worth it though -- hence why some places will pay for it.