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I have travelled extensively in Latin America and Africa. The vast majority of developing and undeveloped countries don't recycle - which is the worst thing yo

• Swizec 7y ago
  We used to have this in Slovenia. You’d bring bottles back to the store and they’d deduct from your next purchase. Then some time in the 90s/00s that stopped. Instead we got glass recycling. And 5 other types of recycling. You’re supposed to sort them all and have some 8 trash cans in total at your house. Oh and if you forget a cap on your bottles or don’t scrape off the paper label and make sure you wash everything before putting it in the trash then you’re a terrible person and you should be ashamed of yourself. So everyone started throwing everything in the same trash. Making sure your recycling is recyclable is just too much work. And don’t even get me started on the compostable plastic trash liners that start composting in the trash can so you can’t even take the trash out ...
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Oh and if you forget a cap on your bottles or don’t scrape off the paper label and make sure you wash everything before putting it in the trash then you’re a terrible person and you should be ashamed of yourself. Same in Poland. I can't think of a better way to sabotage recycling efforts. Whoever introduced this into regulation/common practice, I believe it was intended to actually make people stop segregating trash.
• blattimwind 7y ago
  Unfortunately most laws and policies incentivize to recycle above reuse.
• Jagat 7y ago
  It's all about the cost. Cleaning is more labor intensive than recycling, and if the cost of cleaning is less than the cost of recycling, you'll end up cleaning it. This is only possible in developing countries where it's more economical to use low-cost labor than setting up an expensive recycling facility. As recycling technology gets better and cheaper, you'll see fewer countries opt for cleaning over recycling.
  • bobthepanda 7y ago
    Given that bottles are all generally standard shapes, or can be easily standardized, why would cleaning not be an easy process to automate?
    • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      I think in the common case where you are just washing left over liquid and sanitizing the bottle it probably is super easy but then you have to deal with the rare cases where maybe the bottle is full of dirt or other things that would leave it still dirty after the cleaning process. I don't think its an impossible or even super difficult problem but it does raise the cost.
      • fiblye 7y ago
        Working in automation, I've made machines that check for grime and misprints on new bottles and cans. If a country were to standardize, say, drink bottles, detergent bottles, etc, then this is already a solved problem. Just have a machine clean the bottles to wash away dirt and remove labels, then run it through some image processing software to auto detect any residue. Anything within a certain threshold could either be accepted as clean or needing an extra wash, and anything over a certain % of dirtiness or having undergone N number of washes without getting clean is sent off to be melted down and recycled. Once it's standardized, the software is made, done, and ready to deploy everywhere without any changes (until the government approves new bottle designs). Facilities would be cheap to build. The only problem is every drink manufacturer in the world would oppose it since they can't make goofily shaped bottles with cartoonish logos everywhere.
• Nextgrid 7y ago
  We need proper taxation to encourage this at scale. Reusable items should be sold at a premium that can be redeemed by bringing it back. The market will do the rest. Depending on your income you can still "throw away" stuff, but there will still be significant value in that "trash" to make it worthwhile for other people to dig through it and bring it back into use. Same with plastic bags and things we consider banning for the sake of protecting the planet. Don't ban, just price it in such a way that the item has a built-in reward for someone else to bring it back in circulation.
  • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    >worthwhile for other people to dig through it and bring it back into use. Some states in Australia have a 10c tax on bottles and cans which can be refunded when you recycle them. Almost everyone recycles them at home but if you are away from home they tend to get chucked in the trash and you will see people walking around with bags and tongs picking cans out of the trash to cash in. Make this a $1/bottle when reused and almost everyone will be taking them back or someone will certainly pick it out of the trash. I think it might be worth having the local laws define a set of standard containers/bottles so when you return your beer bottle it doesn't have to go back to the exact same company. There is really no reason other than marketing to have custom bottles for every drink./
    • jakear 7y ago
      Setting the price that high is likely to backfire... make it a $1/bottle when reused and people will start producing these just to profit on the recycle.
      • Ididntdothis 7y ago
        That's not what's happening in Germany though and their deposit is in that range.
        • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
• tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  > Developed countries not doing this is shameful. I'd like to establish a variant of Chesterton's fence - something like 'You don't get to get morally outraged about something without understanding "why".' Why are developed countries not doing it? My guess would be cost, so why is a "wasteful" practice cheaper? Is it something else than externalities that aren't properly represented in the cost, or is the morally odious thing possibly more efficient, or is it something else? Without that answer, it's hard to suggest meaningful action: If it's the externalities, we need to make them part of the cost. If it's actually more efficient this way, we need to stop demanding to make it worse. And if it's something else, then we need to figure out what it is and whether/how to address it. But right now, it seems like random things are picked based on looks/feelings, pointed at, and demanded to change (usually to something that was done in the past and is no longer done).
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    Not cost. Profits! Externalizing these is so much cheaper to the companies involved that they do it that way. Setting up a bottle recycling plant is expensive, and that cost is not passed on to the consumer but absorbed by the company. So the profits go down.
    • e_d_e_v 7y ago
      Here is an interesting and recent article which captures some of that motive: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plastics-pollution/ https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas.... The truth is, that these businesses which externalize the costs are also huge interests in the areas where they are prevalent. Coke is synonymous with Georgia, so it is unlikely they will ever have a bottle deposit there. So is Waste Management (NYSE:WM) . Regarding externalities, many people believe that generating disposable things as a practice is fundamentally externalizing costs.
  • Teever 7y ago
    You make a really good point and it would be relevant to this situation if it wasn't for the fact that some developed countries have implemented this policy. The bigger question you should be asking is why haven't all developed countries adopted such obviously sensible policies. I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason is regulatory capture.
• AmericanChopper 7y ago
  This story reminds me of the years I spent living in various developing Asian countries, and how I’d see dozens of small trash fires burning on the side of the road every single day on my drive home from work.
• 2019-nCoV 7y ago
  Pfand (deposit) for bottles is widespread in Germany.
• m463 7y ago
  A friend of mine employed at a chemical company worked on a plastics recycling projects. Even mixing single-digit percentages of recycled plastics with virgin plastics made the resulting product substandard. Think laundry baskets that break after a couple of uses. The recovery, washing and attempt to recycle the plastic was extremely expensive, labor and resource intensive. In the end he truthfully thought the plastic should be burned. I personally think we should industrialize the waste management, reducing the waste to components that can be easily reused, or inert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
  • paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Maybe a fountain system where people being their own reusable bottles would be better still.
  • Symbiote 7y ago
    > Even mixing single-digit percentages of recycled plastics with virgin plastics made the resulting product substandard. That is why bottle return systems work: they collect only known plastic/metal/glass.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  The problem with anything that you treat as an environmental issue is that various advocates will bikeshed anything. Reusing bottles seems like a no-brainer. Except you’ll hear about how much water and energy is used washing the bottles, that extra fuel and tires will be used transporting them, etc. When my county banned styrofoam cups, somebody appeared claiming it would increase workers compensation claims due to the heavier weight of paper cups.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The difference between bikeshedding and engineering is just that the engineer cares to get these details as right as it makes sense, and then continue with the work. Whether glass bottles are better energy and emissions-wise than disposable plastics is a question that needs to be asked and answered, and anyone pretending it's not relevant is not a good environmentalist. Similarly, with styrofoam vs. paper cups, it's something that could be first estimated and then either ignored (if the difference is within margin of error) or acted upon.
  • Symbiote 7y ago
    This is the kind of argument Coca Cola prompted to protect their branding. New bottles and cans are also washed (you don't want the chemical goop from manufacture inside). Discarded bottles must still be transported to incineration / landfill, in which case more oil/sand/ore must be brought from somewhere.
• siruncledrew 7y ago
  I've looked into this before, and even though people do care, there's 3 big challenges to recycling and reuse in at least the US and Canada: Money, Convenience, and Jurisdiction. Money: The companies producing and "handing-off" much of the waste are unmotivated to make items reusable because the economies of scale already exist today for production, shipping, and distribution of single-use materials, and as long as the disposal side is not their problem, then they just wipe their hands and say "Well, that's for someone else to handle." Convenience: Consumers that end up with the materials now bear the burden of recycling/reusing them. Unless it is engrained behavior (e.g. like in Japan), then that usually means more work for the end-user to figure out what to do with the waste - and also do it correctly. It turns out people that want to do the right thing even have a hard time doing it the right way. There's actually a tendency to 'over-recycle' to the point it becomes a detriment through cross-contamination and increased sorting time. Jurisdiction: It's hard to implement and scale widespread programs when laws and regulations vary across local, county, state, and national levels. Without consensus even among neighboring counties, the costs and incentives to setup and run programs makes it almost impractical or negatively profitable without government support. With China and other SE Asian countries now refusing to take US/Canadian waste, a lot of localities have axed their recycling programs completely or are in a state of flux not knowing what to do with their waste. Overall, a few takeaways are: - Governments need to do their part in setting up proper regulations or tax incentives for recycling/reuse to disincentivize single-use materials. Progress is so slow right now, and there's a long way to do when also competing against corporate lobbying. - Current recycling programs often don't inform, support, or incentivize positive behavior as much as it should. - Eco-materials that are reusable are becoming more introduced at some higher-end places, but they really need to be cost-effective through some means in order to get greater adoption. Anyways, just my $.02 on the matter.
• pragmatic 7y ago
  We used to return pop and beer bottles for a deposit in the US but it's been years since I've seen any of this.
  • maxerickson 7y ago
    Varies by state. In Michigan any store that sells carbonated beverages is required to collect deposit and pay for returns. They mostly use customer fed machines that scan the bar-codes to check that they sell a given product. Last year, legislation was proposed to end it, with the argument being that community recycling would benefit from the aluminum (I think it was a pretense).
    • aij 7y ago
      NY does the same. But a $0.05 deposit for a can to be returned and melted down as scrap is quite different from a $1.50 deposit for a glass bottle to be returned where it can be sanitized and reused. If small dairy farms can do the later, why can't Coca Cola? (And why can Coca Cola do it in South America?)
• kasdk 7y ago
  They've been doing this in Scotland for decades (50yrs?+), you take the glass bottle of IronBru or cola back to the shop or mobile-van-shop and you'd get 10p or something back (it's probably 20p or more nowadays). I also note in Poland and Czech Republic glass bottle beer always costs a little more than the sticker price so I presume there is some $$ in returning - a nice little tip for the airbnb cleaner after a month.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    There is a deposit included in the price of most glass bottles in Poland, but there is also some mix of regulations and store practices that seems targeted at the poor/homeless, to prevent them from making money by collecting bottles in trash cans. I remember having stores refuse larger batches of return bottles without a proof they were originally bought at that particular store. Maybe someone else knows more details; it's just something I observed some years ago.
    • Symbiote 7y ago
      Poor or homeless people collecting cans is widespread in Denmark. Teenagers especially seem to discard them if they're not at home. Many litter bins have a small shelf for bottles, to save people rooting around in the rubbish. Somehow, the fancy supermarket never has poor people returning the bottles at the machine, but the cheap one 200m away always does.
      • KozmoNau7 7y ago
        Probably because the bottle collectors don't want to spend the money they get on overpriced luxury stuff, so they prefer the discount store where the prices are better.
• franciscop 7y ago
  > The vast majority of developing and undeveloped countries don't recycle - which is the worst thing you should be doing Throwing the trash in a landfill is worse than recycling. But yeah, of the "active" actions you can do, recycling is the worst: reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order.
• TrickyRick 7y ago
  Every country I've lived in in Europe does this. Maybe you shouldn't extrapolate from the US to "all developed countries".