5 ms·

It wasn't all trash, but a significant portion was. Without expensive sorting machinery, recycling is generally only profitable with extremely cheap labor and

It wasn't all trash, but a significant portion was. Without expensive sorting machinery, recycling is generally only profitable with extremely cheap labor and a disregard for environmental damage caused by tossing the unprofitable stuff in the nearest dump. What was profitable for 1990s China would not have been profitable for the US.

mikewilliams 8y ago
Recycling will never be profitable, but we can't just keep burying trash and forgetting about it, or maybe we can, I don't know.
- berbec 8y ago
  I don't know about never. The price of a product is related to its scarcity. At a certain point, there will be recyclable materials we are almost out of. At that point, I can see recycling becoming very profitable. I can see a time when we mine garbage dumps for materials.
  - schrectacular 8y ago
    I think about this a lot too. Plastic is extremely energy-dense. The landfills of today could easily be the fuel mines if the future. And yes, it will be full of contaminants, but coal is tainted with heavy metals and radioactive materials. Anyway, recycling has always been a resource drain to make people feel good. It's definitely better to recapture and contain as much waste as possible, but people don't think about things like how much water is wasted by rinsing all those bottles out.
- michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  What's missing from the "profitability" equation are all the costs that are pushed elsewhere: - polluted water so we're all injesting micro plastics - polluted air as the manufacturing is a mess - increased energy consumption to manufacture "perfect" looking packaging. These all have real, hard, cash driven consequences that aren't factored into the normal profitability equation.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Make sure to tell your local scrap yard.
- barney54 8y ago
  What matters is what is being recycled. Some recycling makes economic sense today—metals for example and car batteries. The recycling of some plastics makes sense, but it has to be sorted. There is plenty of land for landfills, but for recycling there may always be things that makes sense to recycle and things that just don’t pencil out.
- 49para 8y ago
  Or perhaps we could just stop creating it in the first place. Is there really a need for all of the one use plastics or the excessive packaging ?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    That's the "reduce" part. But just how does one roll back packaging practices? I can't imagine how that would work. Maybe the German model. But in the US? It seems unlikely.
    - dpark 8y ago
      What is the German model? I don’t recall there being a massive difference in packaging there except for the reusable (deposit required) soda bottles.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Extreme source separation. And laws that impose waste-management costs on manufacturers. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411646 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411250
        dpark 8y ago
        Thanks. Will take a look at those.
  - deepGem 8y ago
    My city Bangalore effectively enforced a plastic ban. So some grocery stores now only have paper bags even to pack veggies. I think it's doable. The government enforced the ban as there was no alternative, we don't have enough space for landfills. A city like Singapore however uses a lot of plastic and thermocol. I wonder where they find space for their landfills. Probably they are doing the same, exporting all the trash to China or Indonesia.
joe_the_user 8y ago
"What was profitable for 1990s China would not have been profitable for the US." And may not be "profitable" for China. Indeed, one might argue China got a leg up in development by trading environmental destruction for capital - but now they have the capital and the destruction is haunting them. And that's the thing. Recycling everything might be affordable but when skimming the best and tossing the rest is more profitable, operations like that will squeeze out operations that pay some of the high cost of proper disposal. "Externalities are externalities" Essentially, I think you can make an argument that private enterprise can not do recycling properly since collecting money for taking the junk and then disposing of the junk as cheaply as possible is going to be a better business model. And hiring an agency to watch the private contractors is going to cost less than having a state agency do it themselves. See the company that was paid to recycle all the CRTs from the early 2000s and wound-up just storing them. Just as much, as recycling exploded, regulations wound-up pandering to upper-middle-class consumers and allow plastic to be marked as recyclable, using unsorted recycling and similar things that kept consumers lazy and ignorant. Of course, this contributed to no real recycling being possible even as a few years it seemed universal.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  > recycle all the CRTs I'm really glad to be done with those. Ugh. Back around 1970 my dad said the world was waiting for two great inventions: 1. A TV you could hang on the wall like a picture 2. A typewriter that you could back up and correct mistakes on. (Few people likely remember Whiteout. Glad to be done with that, too!) And great inventions they turned out to be :-)
  - cladari 8y ago
    If he said that in 1970 he only had 3 years wait for item 2. The IBM Selectric II Correcting was introduced in '73.
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      Correcting by stamping white ink over a letter was indeed a marvelous improvement, but nothing like what came later with a word processor. Later word processors, like the Wang in the late 70's, destroyed Selectrics, and obsoleted the job of "secretary". I remember my Mom typing his thesis over and over on the Royal typewriter. What a boring, dehumanizing task that was. My dad abandoned his typewriter when he bought a Trash-80. I abandoned my typewriter when I discovered the printer in the computer center at Caltech around 1975. I'd use runoff, a marvelous program that is a precursor to HTML.

mikewilliams 8y ago

Recycling will never be profitable, but we can't just keep burying trash and forgetting about it, or maybe we can, I don't know.

berbec 8y ago
I don't know about never. The price of a product is related to its scarcity. At a certain point, there will be recyclable materials we are almost out of. At that point, I can see recycling becoming very profitable. I can see a time when we mine garbage dumps for materials.
- schrectacular 8y ago
  I think about this a lot too. Plastic is extremely energy-dense. The landfills of today could easily be the fuel mines if the future. And yes, it will be full of contaminants, but coal is tainted with heavy metals and radioactive materials. Anyway, recycling has always been a resource drain to make people feel good. It's definitely better to recapture and contain as much waste as possible, but people don't think about things like how much water is wasted by rinsing all those bottles out.
michaelbuckbee 8y ago
What's missing from the "profitability" equation are all the costs that are pushed elsewhere: - polluted water so we're all injesting micro plastics - polluted air as the manufacturing is a mess - increased energy consumption to manufacture "perfect" looking packaging. These all have real, hard, cash driven consequences that aren't factored into the normal profitability equation.
maxerickson 8y ago
Make sure to tell your local scrap yard.
barney54 8y ago
What matters is what is being recycled. Some recycling makes economic sense today—metals for example and car batteries. The recycling of some plastics makes sense, but it has to be sorted. There is plenty of land for landfills, but for recycling there may always be things that makes sense to recycle and things that just don’t pencil out.
49para 8y ago
Or perhaps we could just stop creating it in the first place. Is there really a need for all of the one use plastics or the excessive packaging ?
- mirimir 8y ago
  That's the "reduce" part. But just how does one roll back packaging practices? I can't imagine how that would work. Maybe the German model. But in the US? It seems unlikely.
  - dpark 8y ago
    What is the German model? I don’t recall there being a massive difference in packaging there except for the reusable (deposit required) soda bottles.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Extreme source separation. And laws that impose waste-management costs on manufacturers. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411646 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411250
      - dpark 8y ago
        Thanks. Will take a look at those.
- deepGem 8y ago
  My city Bangalore effectively enforced a plastic ban. So some grocery stores now only have paper bags even to pack veggies. I think it's doable. The government enforced the ban as there was no alternative, we don't have enough space for landfills. A city like Singapore however uses a lot of plastic and thermocol. I wonder where they find space for their landfills. Probably they are doing the same, exporting all the trash to China or Indonesia.

joe_the_user 8y ago

"What was profitable for 1990s China would not have been profitable for the US." And may not be "profitable" for China. Indeed, one might argue China got a leg up in development by trading environmental destruction for capital - but now they have the capital and the destruction is haunting them. And that's the thing. Recycling everything might be affordable but when skimming the best and tossing the rest is more profitable, operations like that will squeeze out operations that pay some of the high cost of proper disposal. "Externalities are externalities" Essentially, I think you can make an argument that private enterprise can not do recycling properly since collecting money for taking the junk and then disposing of the junk as cheaply as possible is going to be a better business model. And hiring an agency to watch the private contractors is going to cost less than having a state agency do it themselves. See the company that was paid to recycle all the CRTs from the early 2000s and wound-up just storing them. Just as much, as recycling exploded, regulations wound-up pandering to upper-middle-class consumers and allow plastic to be marked as recyclable, using unsorted recycling and similar things that kept consumers lazy and ignorant. Of course, this contributed to no real recycling being possible even as a few years it seemed universal.

WalterBright 8y ago
> recycle all the CRTs I'm really glad to be done with those. Ugh. Back around 1970 my dad said the world was waiting for two great inventions: 1. A TV you could hang on the wall like a picture 2. A typewriter that you could back up and correct mistakes on. (Few people likely remember Whiteout. Glad to be done with that, too!) And great inventions they turned out to be :-)
- cladari 8y ago
  If he said that in 1970 he only had 3 years wait for item 2. The IBM Selectric II Correcting was introduced in '73.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Correcting by stamping white ink over a letter was indeed a marvelous improvement, but nothing like what came later with a word processor. Later word processors, like the Wang in the late 70's, destroyed Selectrics, and obsoleted the job of "secretary". I remember my Mom typing his thesis over and over on the Royal typewriter. What a boring, dehumanizing task that was. My dad abandoned his typewriter when he bought a Trash-80. I abandoned my typewriter when I discovered the printer in the computer center at Caltech around 1975. I'd use runoff, a marvelous program that is a precursor to HTML.