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Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
- songshuu 7y agoMake hills, heat homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjido
- jacob019 7y agoYes. When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the landfill. A properly managed landfill is a perfectly responsible way to dispose of plastic. Get the oil from the ground, make it into useful things, then put it back when we're done.
- catalogia 7y ago> When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the landfill. In the 80s from what I understand, in response to the Mobro 4000 incident: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalism/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e...
- iforgotpassword 7y agoMaybe I'm just and old gnarly dude, maybe I focus on the bad parts of society too much, but I don't trust the people running these kinds of things enough. At the end of the day it's still capitalism, you might be budget restricted, you want to pay yourself a bigger bonus, whatever. I don't trust that even just the majority of landfills are constructed to contain the waste long enough. And what incentive should you have to build them that way? It's enough if they hold up until you retire from your management position. Maybe if you have some sort of moral values you might think of your grandchildren and add a couple years. But after that, who cares. Long gone, somebody else's problem.
- Shalle135 7y agoExport it to Sweden https://www.trtworld.com/europe/swedish-recycling-so-successful-it-is-importing-rubbish-24491 https://www.trtworld.com/europe/swedish-recycling-so-success...
- CogitoCogito 7y agoThat article says that 99% of waste is recycled in Sweden, but also points out that a large part of that is incinerated. I don't really understand how incineration can be called recycling. The cycle literally ends at that point. That's not to say it's better than many alternatives (the article claims it's better than most landfills), but let's call it what it is.
- msl 7y ago> The cycle literally ends at that point. Not quite. It turns out that even the ashes have their uses [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incinerator_bottom_ash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incinerator_bottom_ash
- wongarsu 7y agoIf you replace an oil-fired power plant with an incineration plant you save oil that you can now use to make high quality plastic. If you squint hard enough that is recycling trash to oil. Of course oil-fired power plants aren't really used anymore (at grid scale), so it's more like recycling trash into coal or natural gas.
- CogitoCogito 7y agoThe fact that incinerating trash may lead to using slightly oil is not recycling. Just like driving your car more slowly to increase its efficiency is not recycling. I don't remotely understand your reasoning.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.md/75IhQ http://archive.md/75IhQ
- pythux 7y agoThis is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?
- dgzl 7y agoFull lifecycle cost... That would make an interesting website.
- smu 7y agoThis book (although a bit older already) attempts to give an overview of the impact of a lot of stuff: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1846688914/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1...
- lacker 7y agoThe cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
- noisem4ker 7y agoI can't help but think that filling the earth with trash is not the correct solution to the problem, however convenient it may be.
- ethbro 7y agoIs it the correct solution, if it allows us to spend effort and money migrating our energy mix away from fossil fuels? Is it the correct solution, if we have already shifted our economies to carbon-neutral or -negative modes? These are very different situations, and we only have time and money to focus on so many things at once.
- jrs235 7y agoI'm trying to figure out if it still makes sense to sort out the plastics before burying them. Make dedicated plastic landfills separate from all the other rubbish. Then when we find an efficient way to reuse it we will know where in the ground a ton of it is rather than having to open a mixed rubbish fill land fill then clean and process ALL the garbage to sort the plastic out. Seems to me that presorting before burying is a better use of energy and resources.
- whatshisface 7y agoIf sorting technology gets better over time, why even bother presorting before burying? It would be cheaper to bury and them sort in the future. Maybe conventional landfills, with adequate attention paid to leak prevention, were the smartest solution all along.
- catalogia 7y agoPlanning on uncapping the landfill in the future restricts what you can put on top of it in the meantime. Whether or not that's really an issue probably depends on how much free space your country has laying around.
- jrs235 7y agoBecause you'd have to open and move a bunch more junk to sort. Meaning more energy to dig up, move, and sort. Presorting makes more sense to me, we are also in the habit already to separate certainly materials from rubbish (food waste, non recyclables, etc.)
- ethbro 7y agoPersonally, I'm happy that personal recycling hit a bump when China rejected dirty channels. It was marketed in the 80s-00s as more of a panacea than it is, and specifically seems to have inculcated a dangerously willful ignorance of further action. I.e. "I already do the recycling thing, so I do my part." From why I can tell, the toxicity, micro-plastic, and energy concerns are the primary mass-scale benefits? In that order? The majority of which could be reaped at scale by funding toxic material collection programs, mandating less toxic material choices, and re-instituting a bottle tax+. In return, we've let major, industrial-scale environmental catastrophes go unmitigated, because out of sight, out of mind. From my reading, the 1970s push for recycling was always predicated as a vanguard movement, intended to educate the populace at large about environmental issues. The expectation was that we would then pivot to tackle more difficult problems. Instead, we have 50 years of patting ourselves on the back for hauling cardboard out to our suburban recycling containers. + Looking at you, Coke and Pepsi, for fighting bottle taxes around the world.
- grecy 7y agoIt always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud they recycle. Recycling is the worst good thing we should be doing. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order. I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.
- javajosh 7y ago> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, although they won't give you your deposit - which seems like a very fair deal to me. The one odd exception is milk. A classic example of American container reuse, but I don't see any milk sold in glass in Germany.
- aSplash0fDerp 7y agoIts the industries and businesses with the plastic addiction problem, not the consumer. This is similar to making a bad long-term bet and having to pay up. There are a lot of other attractive choices to plastic, but the window to transition seemlessly appears to be closing more and more each week. Seeing the death of coal should give them a map to follow. They made a bad bet on the future too.
- techslave 7y agoit’s a tragedy of the commons problem. plastic is essentially free, so once one manufacturer can make the same consumer quality product with plastic instead of [whatever else], it forces the hands of all other manufacturers. this needs to be solved with regulation.
- jdnenej 7y agoThe simple solution is to move the disposal cost to the producer. Instead of the consumer paying taxes to dispose of the product, the producer must pay and now a producer which produces less waste can sell cheaper products.
- HorstG 7y agoThere is such a system in Germany, called Grüner Punkt or Duales System. They tax manufacturers' packaging and run the collection and recycling from that tax income. Imho it didn't help all that much. I did not find numbers for the reduction in packaging, but my impresssion is "none". As for recycling the waste they collect, there are numbers between "half is just icinerated" and "only 5% is recycled": https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duales_System_(Abfallwirtschaft) https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duales_System_(Abfallwirtsch...
- aazaa 7y ago> As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89% since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to all countries were down 64% in that time period, while mixed paper exports were down 42% according to ISRI. The article doesn't clearly explain why the shift has happened. It does point out: > ... China ... wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard. And later: > China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable junk stateside. Have wages in China really risen so quickly that human garbage sorters are now too expensive? That seems unlikely, and the article gives no evidence for it. An alternative explanation might be that the plastic was never recycled in the first place. It's more than just sorting. Each container has a residue of liquid/solid stuff that can't possibly be compatible with low-cost material recycling. What if the material received by China was actually burned instead to generate energy rather than new containers? That might explain the newfound reluctance of China to take the stuff.
- mulmen 7y agoAre you suggesting China was just burning all the recyclables? If so why did they stop?
- bobthepanda 7y agoChina has a massive pollution problem. If China were to burn all recyclables in a manner consistent with the rest of their industrialization, the process probably wasn’t very clean. China could invest in cleaner recycling processes, but a quick way to reduce a problem is to reduce its scope, and banning imports of recyclable material is certainly a quick way to do that, everyone else be damned. (I don’t really think China burnt all of it, but if they did and stopped this would be why.)
- abhiyerra 7y ago
- mirimir 7y agoDamn, I hate those two paragraph articles. Damn lazy writers. Edit: This is all that Firefox Reader View shows. No explanation. Just this: > Recycling Rethink: What to Do With Trash Now That China Won’t Take It > Saabira Chaudhuri > 1 minute > For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products. > That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and... Another edit: I would subscribe, if I could. I mean, just 1 EUR per quarter. But they want a credit card, and Mirimir has no credit cards. And expecting me to trust their discretion, if I shared my meatspace identity, would be foolish. But even trying for anonymous credit cards violates KYC law, and isn't worth the risk just to read WSJ.
- 6510 7y agoIf it has no purpose, why are you making it?
- mirimir 7y agoIf only three plastics were used in packaging -- say, polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate and polycarbonate -- recycling would be much easier. If they're clean and well separated, they can just be reused. Iffy polyethylene makes great "lumber" for decks, or roofing tiles. Iffy polyethylene terephthalate is great for fleece. Iffy polycarbonate plus carbon black is great for structural applications.
- grogenaut 7y agoIs there that much need for fleece?
- mirimir 7y agoIt helps keep me warm in winter. Better than wool, if I get too wet. I just noticed that my wife bought a cute cap, made from recycled soda bottles. Edit: And not just fleece. Also cloth, and yarn for knitted stuff.
- bamboozled 7y agoOne thing to watch out for is what happens to this stuff when you wash it. Yes it contaminates the environment with micro plastics. One solution is to use a special bag to capture and filter them out. [1] [1] https://en.guppyfriend.com/ https://en.guppyfriend.com/
- mirimir 7y agoOops. Damn. But that's an issue with all synthetic clothing, right? I guess that making bottles and sheeting would be best.
- bamboozled 7y agoI think nylon jackets etc are ok, like the hard shell ski jackets etc. It’s more just and issue with soft fleece type stuff I believe. Patagonia has some information about it on their site somewhere, they also stock the guppy friend bags.
- Animats 7y agoAutomated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as "automated quality control units". The mechanical and air systems do most of the separation; the robots just grab stuff that was mis-sorted by the other systems. The main vision systems are now fast enough that sorters work by moving objects on a wide, fast belt where they go flying off the end. While in flight, multispectral cameras look at the objects, using both reflected and transmitted light, and within milliseconds trigger air jets to blow items in the desired direction. Most robotics videos from startups are sped up because the thing is so slow. The ones from commercially successful sorting companies are slowed down so you can see what's happening. The problem is what to do with the sorted stuff. It's just not very valuable. It's possible to recycle plastic bottles all the way back to more plastic bottles. A huge plant near LA does this for most of southern California. States that charge a recycling fee for containers can handle it, but those that don't...
- xvilka 7y agoThere is quite interesting Israeli startup Ubq[1] claiming it can recycle [2] greasy plastics into the material usable for further plastics manufacturing. [1] https://www.ubqmaterials.com/ https://www.ubqmaterials.com/ [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/climate-solutions/israeli-startup-ubq-turning-trash-into-plastic-products/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/climate-solutio...
- swiley 7y agoIt’s not hard to come up with a process that can recycle anything organic into any petrochemical via Fischer Tropsch. What’s difficult is doing it economically.
- gamblor956 7y agoThey claim to be able to do it economically.
- sjwright 7y agoThere’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%. If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket. And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.
- vorpalhex 7y agoSo you want the poor to be gouged?
- sjwright 7y agoThe economy is already massively skewed against low income people; they’re already “gouged” in a dozen other ways. The solution for that is UBI, not giving up on the environment.
- vorpalhex 7y agoOh, very practical, so we'll just gouge them until we get UBI sorted then?
- sjwright 7y agoThere are countless ways to improve the situation for the poor from being gouged in countless other ways. Telling the environment to fuck off isn’t among the more sensible ones.
- vorpalhex 7y agoYou flipped the consequent. I'm not suggesting we should tell the environment off, I'm suggesting we shouldn't solve our issues by charging the poor a 1000% markup they can't afford. I also think it's unethical to fix world hunger by eating children for what it's worth, as convenient as that might be.
- 7y ago
- vegetish 7y agoBighead thought: Can't we just melt everything down to a big soup and suck out the different fractions/layers and then further chemically and/or mechanically separate all the stuff that sticks together?
- wongarsu 7y agoMost plastics become unusable when they are heated. The simplest workable system would be to burn everything (producing electricity) and filter the metals from the ashes.
- macspoofing 7y agoIs it that hard to figure it out? Bury it or burn it.
- Arete314159 7y agoWe need legislation and consumer pressure to force companies not to use plastic, and to create closed systems a la the old milkman bottle system.
- 205guy 7y agoMore and more I'm starting to think that people must be responsible for their entire trash output. Every thing you buy, from food to electronics to cars and even houses, you are responsible for: food scraps, packaging, recyclable materials, e-waste, old appliances, scrap vehicles, etc. You are are responsible for having near-zero footprint in your life, where this number should be universal for rich and poor alike. You must bear whatever effort or cost to live within this footprint. You must make choices to not acquire things that will become trash and you must take steps to ensure what you need to dispose of goes into proper channels. You will probably want collective solutions to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. You also need regulations to handle compliance and governments to ensure the fair application thereof. Yes, this is an expensive ideal, yet the opposite seems hard to justify morally. Current modern life is using fossil energy, natural resources, and land area on Earth to live a life of ease and deferred responsibility. Just because there is still space to make landfills and air/soil not yet saturated with pollutants, what right do we have to take it? The way this might be similar to CO2 "waste" is an exercise left to the reader.