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The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

• baybal2 8y ago
  It is surreal, but it's true, the biggest American export to China was literally garbage... And it kept being such after decades of different rounds of bans, until the blanket ban last year.
• NorthOf33rd 8y ago
  From a linked nat geo article: “I never thought plastic recycling would work,” says Roland Geyer, an engineering professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the study “Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made.” “There is a viable business model around metal, but plastics never has had that. It’s too low-value, too contaminated, with too many different polymers mixed together. And you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor.” Fascinating stuff. Perhaps it's time to step away from plastic containers for foodstuffs. I'm a little surprised we didn't move at least a little further away post BPA awareness. In Salt Lake City they stopped accepting many types of plastic in the recycling bin this summer, it's been a huge PITA. It's also led me to recycle less. This bugged me so I've changed my shopping habits a bit to compensate. For example, I avoid shopping at Trader Joe's, because everything there comes wrapped in plastic. Everything. It doesn't seem like retailers have quite caught on that it's becoming more difficult to recycle.
  • maccard 8y ago
    > It doesn't seem like retailers have quite caught on that it's becoming more difficult to recycle. They have, they just don't care. It's not directly their problem that you can't recycle their waste until people stop buying there or start returning their waste to them.
  • ggm 8y ago
    I hassled decor (home plastic container company) about BPA and they said their food grade containers had never had BPA. Oddly they saw no need to market on this.
    • Spooky23 8y ago
      It’s a risk area because the risks of BPA likely exist in whatever they are using. I always assume there’s something nasty under the surface with plastic drink and serving ware — like 6 months after the first BPA studies hit the press, GE sold its plastic and silicone divisions.
      • blattimwind 8y ago
        Producing high-purity plastics that don't contain any of the many usually toxic ingredients is quite difficult and requires finely tuned and monitored processes. There is a huge price differential between plastics used for consumer garbage and e.g. plastics used for industrial piping and fixtures (when they're nominally the same plastic) which is gladly paid for.
  • Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    > you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor. Yet, isn’t that what automation provides? It has been two decades since supermarkets in the Nordic countries have whizbang bottle-return machines that take back plastic, aluminium, and glass bottles as long as the barcode is still legible. Is there really no way to make a machine that scans the barcode of various other forms of plastic packaging (like yoghurt containers, ketchup bottles, etc.) and then directs the item to the appropriate container? Since the machine will know the exact categorization of the packaging on the basis of the barcode, then consumers would not be required to correctly sort plastic rubbish themselves.
    • deleted 8y ago
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    • NorthOf33rd 8y ago
      Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free. Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general trash bin it goes. We certainly don't get paid for our our glass. It's extra disappointing because local...legal strangeness, has been encouraging a bit of a local brewery boom. I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse, but that's not an option here. All that said, there's a ton of plastic that goes into single stream recycling that isn't barcoded...
      • yostrovs 8y ago
        No one gets paid for returning bottles in Nordic countries. They get the deposit back that was paid during purchase.
        • Mediterraneo10 8y ago
          If you return other people’s bottles because they are willing to forego the deposit, then you do make some money. One of the ways that I survived my time as a skint foreign student in a Nordic country was picking up bottles in the city center on a Friday or Saturday night when everyone was drinking in the street and couldn’t be arsed to hold on to their bottles and take them back for the deposit. (I hear that now students find it harder to make money like this, because Roma immigrants have cornered this line of work.) Even later when I wasn’t so poor, there is pleasure in hosting a BYOB party and then being able to get the deposit for all the bottles and cans your guests brought.
  • blattimwind 8y ago
    Industrial-grade plastics are recycled to some degree, but only certain plastics are and they are collected completely separated by type and coloring (usually just natural or black). Only a tiny number of companies are able to do this.
  • sjg007 8y ago
    The plastic wrap should be recyclable along with plastic bags. Your local supermarket may take them.
  • anonymous5133 8y ago
    That's why plastic should just be "recycled" in a waste to energy plant.
    • NorthOf33rd 8y ago
      That would raise an entirely different set of issues in Salt Lake City.
  • captainbland 8y ago
    I mean maybe it is, but then comes the problem: Plastics are used because they're cheap, they're not worth recycling because they're so cheap but you can't just do away with the packaging material entirely because that just leads to, in the case of food, spoiled goods and foods which can't be stored or transported for so long which can cause its own environmental issue. It doesn't make economic sense to use a different material which is more recyclable because, by the definition of this problem, they're much more expensive. Perhaps the answer is re-usable plastic containers - maybe some system where you can post them back to the manufacturer for cleaning and re-use. It might just be that once oil drilling for energy goes away, so does some of this problem - at least in that plastics would cease to be so cheap.
    • brownbat 8y ago
      You're right... There are some powerful heuristics in environmentalism-- disposable is generally worse, plastics are bad, recycling is better for the environment... But these will break in some special cases. We should avoid treating them as dogmas and be open minded when examining the entire lifecycle of products. For example, styrofoam is so much less energy intensive than firing ceramics. Given the hot water used in rewashing, you can get some unexpected consequences where disposables are the better option. https://sustainability.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Comparativelifecyclecosts.pdf https://sustainability.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Comparat... (That analysis is sensitive to how energy efficient your dishwasher is, and how durable the ceramic is.) So imagine if even after we stop using petroleum, Texas finds a giant pool of easy oil next to abundant landfill space... Could be Texans should probably just use plastics and toss them in that situation. New Yorkers might have a different calculus, because the cost of trash hauling and processing is more significant there. It all depends.
      • manicdee 8y ago
        Disposables are only the better option when you move some part of the entire planet outside the system you are measuring.
        • 8y ago
  • crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Plastic is fine, as long as you get lots of uses out of it. We have knit plastic bags that we can put veggies in. Super light (no tare needed) and can hold a lot... Yet we've used them hundreds of times. Now think of that crappy flimsy plastic bag, or plastic wrapping. It's used once, and "thrown away" (please: define where away is..). That's the problem - single use and nearly impossible to use for anything else.
  • coliveira 8y ago
    The oil industry is interested in the maximum amount of use of plastics. The less reusable glass and other materials we use, the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates.
    • gruez 8y ago
      >the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates is that relevant if plastic is still the cheapest option? should we pay more just to spite them?
      • KozmoNau7 8y ago
        Yes. Doing the right thing is often less convenient and more expensive than doing the lazy and easy thing. So we have to stop being so lazy and cheap.
  • rdiddly 8y ago
    You're on the right track; if you don't want to dispose of it, don't buy it. I feel like this is just one aspect of environmental awareness that has degraded since the 90s. Packaging has become more wasteful, and there's more of it too, because everything is individually shipped in a box in a truck now (from Amazon etc.) Cars have become bigger and more wasteful than ever (the SUV trend). All the new architecture is full of huge glass windows & curtain walls... one of the most energy-permeable and wasteful barriers (to the extent that a wall is supposed to be a barrier) you could possibly design. But it looks great! As does that hermetically sealed pre-packaged salad in the plastic clamshell. I dunno, we seem to be responding to the problem by pretending all the more ferociously that it doesn't exist.
    • tenpies 8y ago
      In this way, recycling has been one of the most catastrophic environmental efforts ever. If we had stuck with just "reduce and re-use" the world would look drastically different. But no, recycle got included and we got the 3 Rs, so now I can purchase that salad in a single-use clamshell plastic container and feel zero guilt because, hey, recycle!
  • pfarnsworth 8y ago
    We need to code this in law. Any type of plastic used in consumer products needs to be recyclable easily, otherwise outlaw it. Any food containers need to be compostable. I'm willing to pay much higher food and product costs so that the waste we create can be easily recycled. If it makes the product economically unviable then maybe the product isn't that useful.
  • eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Yep, seems the solution is to get rid of it or make plastic producers pay part of the share of recycling it.
• athenot 8y ago
  By weight, I estimate that my household produces about 1/3 recyclable trash vs. landfill trash. But by volume, it's almost at parity (before compaction, since I'm a household). I wonder if an equal alternative would be to collect each type of recyclable once a month. Eg. - 1st week: paper/cardboards - 2nd week: plastics - 3rd week: glass - 4th week: metals Yes it would mean more trash cans but in total volume I don't think it would be much different than my current single-stream bi-weekly collection.
  • GordonS 8y ago
    Different parts of the UK have different collection policies, but for us, our food waste is collected every week, while recycling (paper/card, plastic, metal, but not glass in our area :/) and rubbish ("garbage" for merkins) are collected on alternating weeks. There was uproar when we moved to this from weekly rubbish and recycling collection, but most of the time it really seems to work - we recycle far more than I thought we would.
• deleted 8y ago
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• raverbashing 8y ago
  Plastic is hard, but it does not necessarily need to go back to what it was. Burning it or turning it into asphalt or other kind of building material might be easier/cheaper
• forkLding 8y ago
  Wonder what would happen if plastic bags and straws were just no longer used, I already pack my groceries in a school bag when I go shopping because the plastic bags are flimsy. Straws aren't also necessary, I don't drink coffee I buy with a straw and I'm managing fine. Soft drinks can probably just have those coffee caps and then gradually transition.
  • omnimus 8y ago
    I think this is coming. Straws are getting banned in EU next year and many countries already implemented the ban. Where i am from they got replaced with paper ones and in bars etc with metal / glass ones that get washed like regular glasses. Plastic bags cannot be given for free so you have to buy them and many chains are transitioning to paper or more durable ikea style bags. The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those.
    • jogjayr 8y ago
      > The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those. Composting, and recycling glass, metal, and paper greatly reduces the need for plastic trash bags. Most of my regular trash these days is plastic that can't be recycled - either food contaminated, or thin plastic bags. And when you have so little landfill trash, you don't need to buy those massive plastic garbage bags. In my household, we just use the plastic bags that we get our produce in - and we don't even bag all of our produce, just things like leafy greens (delicate) or green beans/okra (hard to keep together)
  • sjg007 8y ago
    Paper straws are fine for a single use.
  • jaggederest 8y ago
    I think really it has to be a push that plastic is only for extremely durable things that are significant enough to be worth recycling. Something like https://www.c2ccertified.org/ https://www.c2ccertified.org/ being applicable to every usage of plastic, essentially.
• diggernet 8y ago
  I can't wait for the glorious era of fusion-powered recycling. Dump literally anything in the bin. It all gets vaporized (thanks to plentiful, cheap energy), and is centrifuge-sorted into its constituent atoms. Out of curiosity... Just how delusional am I?
  • ggm 8y ago
    High heat is one of the ways PCBs are reprocessed to constituents. Given the energy cost to make long chain molecules it seems a shame to spend energy breaking them. I think it might be better to not make as much in the first place and make kinds which are thermo-mouldable to repurpose
  • ben_w 8y ago
    It would work, but we can do much better than brute force. What you’re describing is how I’d turn the Moon and Mercury into a Dyson swarm (as the mineral extraction part of a clanking replicator), but I suspect that even in that example someone who only just managed a chemistry BSc could do vastly better than anything I can imagine.
  • PinkMilkshake 8y ago
    I believe you are referring to a fusion torch! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_torch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_torch
• nradov 8y ago
  We need to focus more on reuse than on recycling. I'd like to see regulations and tax incentives to encourage beverage companies to use glass bottles that can be washed and reused, rather than disposable aluminum or (even worse) plastic. It's a common sight in Silicon Valley offices to see greasy empty pizza boxes in the recycling bin. People just don't seem to realize that greasy cardboard can't be recycled, and might even contaminate other material.
  • grogenaut 8y ago
    You can compost many greasy pizza boxes though. Thta's the guidance up here in Seattle.
  • jayd16 8y ago
    But as the article suggest, most glass is contaminated and thrown away.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      With single-stream recycling.
    • Spooky23 8y ago
      But, the impact of glass wastage is just landfill volume. I get milk delivered from a farmer in resusable glass bottles. We lose like 1% a year, which represents probably 95% less waste than buying disposable plastic or cardboard containers.
    • nradov 8y ago
      It's tough to recycle glass. That's why I suggested we focus on reusing glass bottles. Use deposits to encourage consumers to return bottles to retailers, then send them back to bottling plants to be washed and refilled. That actually used to be common in the US but doesn't happen much anymore.
      • matheweis 8y ago
        There is a slow turnaround happening in this area with milk, at least in the cities I’ve lived in the last several years. You can buy milk in glass jars, (as a bonus, produced within the state) and take the the empty bottles back to the grocery store for a $2 credit.
• wavesounds 8y ago
  Out of curiosity does anyone know of any startups in the trash/recycling space?
• ggm 8y ago
  Some domestic recycling was partially sorted to separate cardboard and paper from glass and metal. I think cost shifting and effort/cost decisions here are heading back to the user/consumer input end having more work to do. Incentives here would have to be things like a discount on the waste levy.
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  Recycling and trash separation would be a great a project for a "moonshot". You need big advancements in robotics, computer vision and probably a lot of other areas to make this. I wish some billionaire would throw some money at it. It would be more helpful to humanity than flying to Mars for example.
• James_Owens_69 8y ago
  I have an idea, ask me for more money and I will gladly pay for trash companies to sort my garbage. F them for trying to force me to do their job. Hire an army of hobos and inmates. I don't care.
  • Maarten88 8y ago
    That mentality, combined with the spinelessness of US government and corruption by industry, nicely sums up the article: it can't be improved, we'll have to live with the pollution! It's just much more difficult to separate stuff after everything is mixed up, like it says in the article. Most European countries show that it is possible to do much better. I have to separate plastics/cans, glass, paper, vegetables and non-recyclables (5 streams). And the occasional batteries/electronics. Really, it's not that hard, if you furnish for it. In my household, the non-recyclable waste has shrunk to just one garbage bag every two weeks, for a family of four. And still I think much should be improved, starting with much stricter regulation for packaging. We still dispose a lot of plastics, around 3 medium size bags every two weeks. Just forbid (or tax into oblivion) single-use plastics entirely, and let the food and retail industries innovate their packaging/distribution/fulfillment using paper, carton, bio-plastics, glass or re-usable. Much should be improved, and everyone should play their part. Maybe there is a startup idea servicing people who just refuse to do so?
    • r00fus 8y ago
      > spinelessness of US government and corruption by industry There are beneficiaries to this negligence and they are handsomely profiting (and giving their cronies in Congress campaign contributions) while the world starts to resemble the one in Wall-E more and more. Campaign finance reform and fixing broken electoral processes has the best probability to exposing and removing the corruption.
• coliveira 8y ago
  Single stream recycling was a big scam that worked as long as China was accepting this kind of garbage. The more people used this type of recycling, the more they could send to China and the less garbage had to be processed locally. Now that they have to deal locally with the realities of recycling, you see that the equation is changing.
• aznpwnzor 8y ago
  This is primarily a cultural issue. Taiwanese children are taught from day one how to sort recyclables. It is standard not only to sort properly, but also wash containers and decompose them into parts if they are made up of different materials. Not only that but due to Japanese influence, reuse is a huge part of the culture already. There's even a completely different conversation about how children are taught how to fold their trash and stack containers to minimize space use in trash. Weird how if we take advantage of the neural nets we are born with what we can do...
• 8bitsrule 8y ago
  There are compostable plastics (e.g. http://www.worldcentric.org/biocompostables/bioplastics http://www.worldcentric.org/biocompostables/bioplastics) (No info there on pricing ...) "Bioplastics can take different length of times to totally compost ... and are meant to be composted in a commercial composting facility, where higher composting temperatures can be reached and is between 90-180 days. Most existing international standards require biodegradation of 60% within 180 days..."
• skybrian 8y ago
  Maybe this is a silly question, but what are the downsides of going back to sending more trash to landfills?
• nitwit005 8y ago
  I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but here if you peek inside the separate bins outside, or in restaurants, it's basically just mixed trash. Aside from the usual problem of people not caring about sorting, one or more of the bins is often full, and homeless people sort through the trash to take the aluminum cans, leaving mostly the incorrectly sorted stuff behind.
• charliebrownau 8y ago
  Japan for YEARS has had dedicated bins and the WHOLE country managed to adapt Is it FINALLY time for the West to seriously consider recycling glass, plastic , cans , paper , food scraps , etc or we can just double down on stupid and keep burying rubbish in the ground