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But recycling is not a value problem, but a survival problem. It might not be cost effective to eat, but if you don't spend X amount of your salary in it, you d

But recycling is not a value problem, but a survival problem. It might not be cost effective to eat, but if you don't spend X amount of your salary in it, you die, so you do it. This is the same IMHO.

cafebabbe 7y ago
Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer. I think the problem is that there is no 'long-term' factored in how we measure value.
- fifnir 7y ago
  > Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer. ...can you please take a step back, read this again, and think about what it is that you're saying?
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Economics are a tool to describe emergent behaviour in societies. “Value” is, in this context, just a word we use as a tool to model reality. We see reality as a river of efforts, and cause and effect relationships eddying up and down. We use words like “value” and “incentive” to try and label those existing flows. But reality doesn’t care about economics. It just is. We try to understand only so we can align our mental models with reality better, which then enables us to steer our society towards a more desirable stream, hopefully leading towards a more desirable outcome. This is always implicit when speaking about economics. Don’t attach too much meaning to “value” , or “purpose” , or any of those models. They’re just describing a model of reality, not prescribing it. TLDR: “value” in economics != “value” in Buddhism.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      Why do you think you’re correct? When everyone learned that their shoes were made by slave labor, shoe companies made drastic changes away from using slave labor. People are generally aware of the externalities of their economic decisions, they just don’t often line up with the most vocal environmental voices.
  - cafebabbe 7y ago
    I don't know. Can you ?
barrkel 7y ago
No, it's a value problem. When the resources tied up in recyclables are scarce enough from other sources, the value will go up. When you're really hungry and there's not much food, your willingness to pay more for it increases. Same mechanism. Ultimately we need to bake the cost of disposal into the purchase price.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  I've always found it odd that the free market hawks are so against factoring the externalities of their decisions into pricing.
  - sgregnt 7y ago
    I think this isn't true what you say, Do you have links? I always assumed some of the free market hawks are to incorporate the externalities in the cost, e.g. selling the right to pollute.
    - ohithereyou 7y ago
      Biggest example to me is the push to loosen regulation on the fossil fuel industry without enacting a tax that pays for mitigating the damage that burning their fuel does to the climate.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        You're confusing theory with politics. In theory the free market works when transactions are consensual, which means you can't pollute someone else's property without their permission, and they're not inclined to give it to you without due compensation. In practice there are a lot of politicians in places where fossil fuels are a major industry, and they're pragmatists with no real principles other than wanting to get elected.
galfarragem 7y ago
On short-term (while resources are enough), probably none of the 3Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - make sense in Capitalism, except to guarantee the long-term survival of the system itself. Most politicians already acknowledged it and they seem to prefer the (uneconomical) Recycle than the game changers Reduce and Reuse.
- IanCal 7y ago
  Surely every player in a capitalist has an incentive to reduce or reuse material in their own production, and an incentive to recycle if it is cheaper than binning it.
  - pornel 7y ago
    Producer of garbage doesn't pay the cost of disposing it (consumers do), and even the cost of garbage disposal doesn't seem to factor in larger environmental costs. You can produce plastic without paying a cent towards cleanup of The Great Pacific garbage patch.
dbrgn 7y ago
Recycling is a economic-cost vs environmental-value optimization problem. The university I studied at also has a department that analyzes renewable energies and recycling. They developed a system that does this cost-vs-value-analysis for recycling. In the end, you get a number of environmental points for every dollar you invest into recycling. The core idea is that we have a certain budget to improve our environment. If a dollar invested in plastic recycling is 20 times less efficient than a dollar invested in glass recycling, then we should stop recycling plastic. The results (for Switzerland): Glass and aluminum recycling works great. Battery recycling is OK, but because today's batteries contain way less toxic chemicals (like Cadmium) than they did in the 80s, it's largely an artifact from the past. They consider battery recycling good enough to keep, but wouldn't start recycling them if the infrastructure wouldn't exist right now. Mixed plastic recycling is being hyped right now. There are companies that offer subsidized plastic bags where you can throw in all kinds of plastic. According to the study, the environmental value of recycling such mixed plastics in Switzerland is really low and should not be done, we are basically wasting our money which would be better spent on other projects that have higher value. Their summary was basically that instead of recycling plastic and burning fuel in combustion engines, we should convert oil to plastic products and then - once they have reached the end of the lifecycle - burn those in modern incineration plants. The energy gained from that can then be used to heat buildings and to power electrical cars. This way, the energy is re-used, first in a product, then in mobility. Of course that only works if you have modern, clean incineration plants. If you burn the plastics on a pile, then the environmental value of plastic recycling skyrockets.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >. Their summary was basically that instead of recycling plastic and burning fuel in combustion engines, we should convert oil to plastic products and then - once they have reached the end of the lifecycle - burn those in modern incineration plants. The energy gained from that can then be used to heat buildings and to power electrical cars. This way, the energy is re-used, first in a product, then in mobility. Note that this solution is so obvious what every high school chemistry student proposes as soon as they learn that plastics are made from oil and have similiar molecular structure. We just don't do it because I don't know why.

cafebabbe 7y ago

Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer. I think the problem is that there is no 'long-term' factored in how we measure value.

fifnir 7y ago
> Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer. ...can you please take a step back, read this again, and think about what it is that you're saying?
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Economics are a tool to describe emergent behaviour in societies. “Value” is, in this context, just a word we use as a tool to model reality. We see reality as a river of efforts, and cause and effect relationships eddying up and down. We use words like “value” and “incentive” to try and label those existing flows. But reality doesn’t care about economics. It just is. We try to understand only so we can align our mental models with reality better, which then enables us to steer our society towards a more desirable stream, hopefully leading towards a more desirable outcome. This is always implicit when speaking about economics. Don’t attach too much meaning to “value” , or “purpose” , or any of those models. They’re just describing a model of reality, not prescribing it. TLDR: “value” in economics != “value” in Buddhism.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    Why do you think you’re correct? When everyone learned that their shoes were made by slave labor, shoe companies made drastic changes away from using slave labor. People are generally aware of the externalities of their economic decisions, they just don’t often line up with the most vocal environmental voices.
- cafebabbe 7y ago
  I don't know. Can you ?

barrkel 7y ago

No, it's a value problem. When the resources tied up in recyclables are scarce enough from other sources, the value will go up. When you're really hungry and there's not much food, your willingness to pay more for it increases. Same mechanism. Ultimately we need to bake the cost of disposal into the purchase price.

ohithereyou 7y ago
I've always found it odd that the free market hawks are so against factoring the externalities of their decisions into pricing.
- sgregnt 7y ago
  I think this isn't true what you say, Do you have links? I always assumed some of the free market hawks are to incorporate the externalities in the cost, e.g. selling the right to pollute.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    Biggest example to me is the push to loosen regulation on the fossil fuel industry without enacting a tax that pays for mitigating the damage that burning their fuel does to the climate.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      You're confusing theory with politics. In theory the free market works when transactions are consensual, which means you can't pollute someone else's property without their permission, and they're not inclined to give it to you without due compensation. In practice there are a lot of politicians in places where fossil fuels are a major industry, and they're pragmatists with no real principles other than wanting to get elected.

galfarragem 7y ago

On short-term (while resources are enough), probably none of the 3Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - make sense in Capitalism, except to guarantee the long-term survival of the system itself. Most politicians already acknowledged it and they seem to prefer the (uneconomical) Recycle than the game changers Reduce and Reuse.

IanCal 7y ago
Surely every player in a capitalist has an incentive to reduce or reuse material in their own production, and an incentive to recycle if it is cheaper than binning it.
- pornel 7y ago
  Producer of garbage doesn't pay the cost of disposing it (consumers do), and even the cost of garbage disposal doesn't seem to factor in larger environmental costs. You can produce plastic without paying a cent towards cleanup of The Great Pacific garbage patch.

dbrgn 7y ago

Recycling is a economic-cost vs environmental-value optimization problem. The university I studied at also has a department that analyzes renewable energies and recycling. They developed a system that does this cost-vs-value-analysis for recycling. In the end, you get a number of environmental points for every dollar you invest into recycling. The core idea is that we have a certain budget to improve our environment. If a dollar invested in plastic recycling is 20 times less efficient than a dollar invested in glass recycling, then we should stop recycling plastic. The results (for Switzerland): Glass and aluminum recycling works great. Battery recycling is OK, but because today's batteries contain way less toxic chemicals (like Cadmium) than they did in the 80s, it's largely an artifact from the past. They consider battery recycling good enough to keep, but wouldn't start recycling them if the infrastructure wouldn't exist right now. Mixed plastic recycling is being hyped right now. There are companies that offer subsidized plastic bags where you can throw in all kinds of plastic. According to the study, the environmental value of recycling such mixed plastics in Switzerland is really low and should not be done, we are basically wasting our money which would be better spent on other projects that have higher value. Their summary was basically that instead of recycling plastic and burning fuel in combustion engines, we should convert oil to plastic products and then - once they have reached the end of the lifecycle - burn those in modern incineration plants. The energy gained from that can then be used to heat buildings and to power electrical cars. This way, the energy is re-used, first in a product, then in mobility. Of course that only works if you have modern, clean incineration plants. If you burn the plastics on a pile, then the environmental value of plastic recycling skyrockets.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>. Their summary was basically that instead of recycling plastic and burning fuel in combustion engines, we should convert oil to plastic products and then - once they have reached the end of the lifecycle - burn those in modern incineration plants. The energy gained from that can then be used to heat buildings and to power electrical cars. This way, the energy is re-used, first in a product, then in mobility. Note that this solution is so obvious what every high school chemistry student proposes as soon as they learn that plastics are made from oil and have similiar molecular structure. We just don't do it because I don't know why.