12 ms·

Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic

• admn2 6y ago
  I'm in Chicago. Literally every time I see a garbage truck, it's dumping the recyclables in with the trash. This doesn't surprise me at all.
  • 205guy 6y ago
    I’m sure it has happened, that like in he article, the recycling collector just puts it in the trash. But in many places, recycling is collected in garbage trucks, and sometimes in the same trucks as the trash with separate internal compartments. Whether that truck takes the contents to a recycling facility or not will depend on the local practices and economics.
  • Ma8ee 6y ago
    That’s a common urban myth. The trucks have several compartments.
    • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Not where I live, at least not for glass. I can see down into them from above and it all goes into the same bin. No separation at all.
      • Ma8ee 6y ago
        Which doesn’t make sense, since glass is relatively easy and economical to recycle. (I’m not saying what you say is untrue, there’s a lot of things in the world that doesn’t make sense.)
        • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
          I know. Just wanted to say: "I can confirm this so called urban myth." It's not that I'd been that interested in it, just read about it, and looked into it afterwards. And it happens. Again and again.
• ceejayoz 6y ago
  Not just touted, but actively pushed legislative requirements that lied to consumers. > Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it.
  • armSixtyFour 6y ago
    The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it, totally ignoring that it's either prohibitively expensive for many or almost impossible to judge the sustainability for many products.
    • tastyfreeze 6y ago
      If consumers were compensated for recycling materials they would be much more inclined to sort properly. Recycling centers that take materials that cost too much to recycle likely have a government contract to "take care of it". They dont have a lot of incentive to be efficient. They get paid to make it disappear.
      • LordDragonfang 6y ago
        I don't know about where you live, but in California, we have a "bottle deposit" on both glass bottles and aluminum cans (~$0.10 per item), which gets returned to you if you bring it to a recycling center. The only people I see actually bothering to sort and return these are very low income people and homeless people that go through public trash cans.
        • ceejayoz 6y ago
          That seems win/win, doesn't it?
        • Symbiote 6y ago
          In Denmark its 1-3kr, or 15-50¢, depending on the size and material of the container. Plenty of cans are collected by homeless / lowest income people, but it's also just about enough that average people will collect them too. If I have a huge bag after a party, I return them. When I normally only have 0-2 bottles in a typical week, I take them outside and put them on the little shelf on the bin for someone to collect without needing to rummage: https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/styles/975x600_manual_crop/public/migrated/nyheder/field_artikler_stort_billede/pantholder-dsc_0013.jpg?itok=7MWZoupy https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/style... New food packaging can only use recycled material collected in this way. The general household recycling is considered too dirty.
• nend 6y ago
  Reduce, reuse, recycle - meaning recycling is the last option. It's better to not consume plastic in the first place, but if you must, find additional uses for it. It takes more of a lifestyle change though than to simply put your cans in a different barrel. Which is probably why few people are willing to try it.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    This is not an individual choice. I can try to recycle plastic, but if there is no government programs to handle this issue, it will not work.
    • chockablock 6y ago
      You can choose to reduce or reuse, though.
      • andrekandre 6y ago
        imagine you are a single, office worker, with long hours (no time to prepare your own lunches) and the only place you can get any food is the convenience store around the corner, you can get your lunch in a plastic container (bento box, sandwich container etc) and your drink from a pet bottle... where is the choice to reduce there? more than anything, the problem is the system and limited capabilities we have to reduce the usage of most plastic items
  • kennywinker 6y ago
    > Which is probably why few people are willing to try it. This is placing a lot of the blame on individual people. I would very much like to use less plastic, and I'm willing to work for it... but my options are very limited. Nearly every product I buy is encased in multiple layers of plastic. I favor second hand stuff, and reduce my overall consumption by avoiding unnecessary purchases. Because I live in a major west-coast city, I can go out of my way to shop at a zero-waste grocery store - but they don't carry many things that I need for daily life. Ultimately, consumer choice only works if there are options available. I can't vote with my dollars for things that are not on the ballot.
• jonplackett 6y ago
  I wonder what the world would look like now if there never was any oil. We’d have missed out on a lot of industrialising. Would we have had as many wars? I guess we could still have got into space using methane. Will all the positive stuff oil’s given us be undone by just how bad the climate gets? Interesting thought experiment!
  • jonplackett 6y ago
    Just realised it would probably just be a world filled with coal smoke, but at least less plastic pollution!
    • hesdeadjim 6y ago
      A jump from coal straight to nuclear and renewables would have been possible. That said, there are an innumerable number of side effects from cheap fossil fuels that would change present reality as we know it were they removed. Removing cheap fossil fuel energy could have drastically slowed down emigration from cities to the burbs, so it’s also fun to imagine a different present where there’s dozens of New York Cities spread around the nation, connected by mass transport, and separated by vast swaths of mostly empty land. As EV tech and internet became widespread, it’s likely that the development of suburbia would only just begin to be happening now. Or not. Like you say though, fun thought experiment.
      • Retric 6y ago
        Most of what oil provides you can get from coal and some chemistry, even liquid fuels. I think a world without coal would have been significantly different though. Metals would be much more expensive, so most structures would have stayed would or stone. I think electric street cars would have been possible based on hydropower and minimal metal usage. That means cities would end up with mid density suburbs based on row houses like san francisco. More dramatic is the lack of cars means dramatically higher density by default without parking etc. Wind power would have been a much bigger deal never really falling out of favor. Eventually solar would have become a major deal which probably scaled back to most of what we are used to.
• jpab 6y ago
  Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979
  • disown 6y ago
    It was on the frontpage since yesterday. And the minute it drops off the frontpage, it gets spammed to the frontpage again. Unbelievable. Not only that another NPR story got spammed to the frontpage at the same time. Now that's interesting. Edit: Looks like I touched a nerve.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • conception 6y ago
      Important story by big news outfit is shared a lot is hardly interesting.
    • kennywinker 6y ago
      How can a frontpage based on user votes contain spam? Seems like you're implying something nefarious going on in order to explain a huge + impactful story's presence here?
    • dang 6y ago
      It's perfectly normal. No one sees everything that gets posted or that appears on the front page.
    • lumberingjack 6y ago
      Last few months this place is turned into reddit as the Reddit folks are exiled and leave in masses that site is just fake user accounts or maybe like 500 people with 5 million accounts. Real users are coming over here remembering that they can actually post stuff and it's screwing up this entire site. Because they vote brigade echo chamber stories.
• blululu 6y ago
  It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling. The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system. For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and sorting is hard (if you can't tell what the plastic container you threw in the bin is made out of (HDPE?) in a second then it is trash). FWIW this is also a relatively easy problem to fix. We could look to the brief but successful history of recycling in Taiwan as a good example to copy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_Taiwan)
  • saddlerustle 6y ago
    If cost of recycling is high, what is the benefit? It's not significantly reduced carbon emissions (a person's average annual plastic usage is priced at only tens of dollars worth of carbon emissions under a system like the EU ETS), and in the US it's not land shortage (an order of magnitude more land is used by golf corses than landfills), and modern landfills don't pollute the surrounding environment.
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      The landfill here supports recycling (on site) because it reduces their operating costs. I believe one of the more effective diversions is cardboard (where recycling it at slight income is better than spending resources burying it).
      • csharptwdec19 6y ago
        Typically the more treated the paper, the less useful it is to recycle. Think Newspaper vs Book paper or Glossy and bleached cardboard vs plain brown. Last I knew, it's many metals, some paper, and some glass that are typically net benefit to recycle (from an energy perspective.) Plastics tend to be a lot tougher because of the energy requirements (transporting, cleaning, etc.)
    • 6y ago
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  I see the solution as just a better recycling symbol that a machine can easily recognize. Instead of the 7 broad categories, have 1000 highly specific categories and tag each piece in such a way that a machine can read the tag and sort it accordingly. Number 1 plastic with water and number 1 plastic with yoghurt should have different tags because one may be contaminated and one not. The former might still be #1. The latter would be #278. Solving the sorting problem would make recycling a lot more economical as that is where a lot of the costs are.
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    With single stream everything is contaminated. And then many of the categories simply aren't worth anything, sorted or not.
  • regularfry 6y ago
    Digimarc have a product for exactly this. Not sure if they do the 1000 categories thing, but machine readable definitely.
• henrikschroder 6y ago
  Who cares? Burn the plastic trash! You get the plastic item use out of it, and you get almost all the energy from it as if you had burned the oil directly.
  • noizejoy 6y ago
    I think that will require a large number of new technologies to make such burning environmentally sustainable and cost competitive with other energy producing technologies. I don’t have enough science, engineering, or economic knowledge to even take a wild guess at the feasibility of such technology. Maybe that would be a better challenge for Mr. Musk and various other privateers and governments than running away to Mars to escape the mess we’re making of our own planet.
    • henrikschroder 6y ago
      Plenty of countries have excellent trash burning plants already, all the technology exists. You only need to compete with peak oil burner plants, not the entire power producing chain. Same co2 emissions, a bit less electricity, but the trash doesn't go on horrible polluting landfills. Win-win.
      • macinjosh 6y ago
        Modern landfills don’t pollute.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    Trash can act as an energy store, to produce power during times when solar and wind production are low. If the plastics were ultimately produced from non-fossil carbon (as paper/cardboard are), what's the problem with this?
  • regularfry 6y ago
    And the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere, rather than getting sequestered in the ground...
• taf2 6y ago
  Is there maybe an opportunity to use machine learning and vision here to perhaps create a business ? Anyone working on this ?
  • BluSyn 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_sorting There is an opportunity to improve this tech with better vision recognition systems. Already being worked on, but hasn't been implemented at large enough scale yet.
  • sxp 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/c/Bulkhandlingsystems/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Bulkhandlingsystems/videos has demos of automatic sorting machines.
    • taf2 6y ago
      From the looks of those machines (size) it looks to be a big business already
  • eidoom 6y ago
    https://www.max-ai.com/ https://www.max-ai.com/ seem to be
  • fortran77 6y ago
    Blockchain, too.
• mirekrusin 6y ago
  If you go to Switzerland it opens your eyes a bit - there's no plastic recycling, there's only PET plastic recycling. If the bottle/whatever is not PET, it's not recycleble and you have to buy special, taxed bag that's used for "everything else" that gets burned/whatever. PET plastic can be recycled to lower grade plastic used for outdoor mats etc.
  • flixic 6y ago
    Same in Japan.
    • fuckyah 6y ago
      And germany
    • earthboundkid 6y ago
      I also noticed that only PET plastic was recycled in Japan. Is PET really more recyclable or is that just PR?
      • neltnerb 6y ago
        It is really more recyclable. It is still not infinitely recyclable so personally I'd prefer paper, glass, cloth, etc.
    • franciscop 6y ago
      On the other hand, packaging (and thus plastic waste) in Japan is next-level ridiculous. A fancier food present will be often wrapped in at least 3 layers, and I've counted u to 5: bag, present paper, normal box, group package, individual package.
      • capableweb 6y ago
        On the other foot, Japan is next-level clean and don't think I've ever seen trash there on the streets, especially not like in South America. So more plastic in packaging but more goes into bins, wonder if it equalizes out on harm-done compared to Japan?
• flenserboy 6y ago
  I remember plenty of ads, 20 or 30 years back, showing how they would be able to easily & cheaply break down & reuse plastic (they compared it to un- & re-zipping a zipper). Was that vision / promise simply abandoned, put on hold, or not true in the first place? (I'd put my money on #3, but the idea was cool).
  • redis_mlc 6y ago
    It's #3 because there's too many molecular types of consumer plastic (so melting it isn't good enough to reuse), food contamination is a problem, and it's usually cheaper to make new plastic than move it and recycle it. In addition, at least in North America, there is no consumer recycling - it's all landfilled unless a private contractor is paid vast sums to recycle it, or a local city council lucks into a good deal. (I read newspapers until recently, and about once a year there's a short article on the inability to find a recycling partner, so off to the landfill it all goes. Doesn't matter what city. I have seen video of New York using a recycling barge that looks legit for at least some streams.) The best you can do is burn plastic for electricity today, unless you redesign everything with a sane master recycling plan tomorrow. The only benefit of consumer recycling in NA is that we've trained people on awareness and how to separate trash, kinda. There was a time when even that was unknown.
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  Almost all the plastic trash I see is due to food takeout. If we simply were to require that food take out use reusable containers (special bins in public spaces, deliver people transport back to restaurant for home deliver) I think NYC could cut its waste by a huge portion.
  • macinjosh 6y ago
    I am sick of people saying problems are easy to fix by just enacting new laws or regulations. It is so naive. Reusable containers are relatively heavy and take up space in delivery vehicles. It will cost the restaurants time and money to do this. People won’t spend the time to take the containers back so they will end up in the trash or people will find use for them. So all you’ve done is drive up food costs for low income folks and created more wasteful containers. How dumb is that?
    • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      While there may be some truth to this, another truth would be that as it is now we massively externalize the true costs by making it other peoples problems by shady schemes.
      • Ericson2314 6y ago
        Yeah OP is presuming I want the regulation and I expect the restaurant business to otherwise function the same. Of course I don't. We're finally accounting for the externalities, and if this makes some restaurants unprofitable so be it.
      • Ericson2314 6y ago
        Yeah GP is presuming I want the regulation and I expect the restaurant business to otherwise function the same. Of course I don't. We're finally accounting for the externalities, and if this makes some restaurants unprofitable so be it.
• drak0n1c 6y ago
  It doesn't help when progressive cities like Seattle provide giant recycling bins to houses with no charge for pickup, while charging regressive high prices for small regular garbage bins. It's a huge incentive just to throw excess plastic and foam bits into the recycling - people do not like getting charged another $5 for a one-time extra garbage bag pickup.
  • miked85 6y ago
    I think it is also just a huge incentive to simply throw anything into recycling bins. Just glancing inside the one at my complex reveals it is used as a normal trash bin by many.
• dboreham 6y ago
  I discovered this last year when our city posted on FB that you couldn't put berry and salad clamshell containers in recycling because if these were found then the entire batch would go to the landfill. After some clarification basically only water and coke bottles are eligible here.
  • neltnerb 6y ago
    I have called up the waste disposal departments now in three different cities I've lived in (Somerville, Boulder, Oakland) and in none of the cases did the people working there have a clue about how recycling works. They just didn't know anything about plastic. I'd be like "can I recycle polystyrene (number 6) here" and they'd answer with "put any rigid plastic in the recycling" and I'm just like... that is not how it works... Surprise -- none of those three cities can recycle polystyrene. That's what those clamshells are usually made of. Same material as packing peanuts, potentially my least favorite invention of the modern shipping industry.
• alpineidyll3 6y ago
  I can't count the amount of flack I got for telling people about this years ago.
• microcolonel 6y ago
  Non-aluminium recycling doesn't make a whole lot of sense in North America. For plastics, you can make some case for PET recycling, but little else is at all practical. Paper recycling is doable, but basically pointless when we have such high volumes of farmed pulp trees, and new pulp is more efficient than ever. The one thing I could see working well is a subsidized glass reuse program. I know a lot of people who prefer to get things in glass anyhow, and cleaning/sanitizing glass at an industrial scale is an existing capability.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Your measurement of "efficiency" appears to exclude the cost of the externalities associated with handling paper as waste.
    • microcolonel 6y ago
      What are those costs? My general understanding is that it may break down in a gassy way, but is that really so significant that it justifies the energy and opportunity cost involved in sorting and processing it for recycling? How does the cost of paper recycling compare to the cost of scaling up landfill gas recovery (something most operators are looking to do anyhow)? Far as I can tell, some of the most popular recycled paper products, such as paperboard and molded pulp, actually require somewhere around twice as much energy to produce as virgin paperboard and molded pulp products.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too, since that can be easily separated from the waste stream magnetically. Glass, I don't think makes sense, except for downcycling to aggregate.
    • microcolonel 6y ago
      > I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too Oh, sure, forgot that. Though steel and iron are not that common in household waste where I'm from. I specifically point to glass reuse rather than glass recycling. As soon as you have to process glass, the energy costs are massive.
• lilSebastian 6y ago
  Corporations lying to ensure revenue? No, I don't believe it.
• SahAssar 6y ago
  When I first heard that in the US they just throw all "recycling" in the same bin it sounded insane. I'm used to sorting into colored glass, clear glass, paper, cardboard, metal, compost, batteries, plastic and "general". I'm pretty sure the metal and plastic (if it actually is ever recycled) categories could benefit from better segmentation too.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Why? Separation actually works pretty well, I'm not sure why we need to "fix" that. What doesn't is people still leave food in things and don't do basic things like not throw in little bits of plastic like straws.
    • SahAssar 6y ago
      Separation is another step that needs to be taken somewhere else if not done by the consumer. The person throwing out garbage is the person responsible for the garbage and also the person that has the item in it's hand so they are both the best suited to sort it and the person that we should incentivize to do it.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • stjohnswarts 6y ago
        I don't agree. It's more energy efficient and less environmentally destructive for you (or I) to walk everywhere we need to get to and yet here we are with bicycles, cars, airplanes, etc.
  • anigbrowl 6y ago
    Can you fill in the rest of the picture? How many different receptacles do you have to put out on the street?
    • SahAssar 6y ago
• KoenDG 6y ago
  Same with batteries, far as I'm aware. Can't actually be recycled. Just gathered and put in very large warehouses and nothing is done with it. That's what our chemist teacher told us about 10 years back, anyway. So for me that remains in the "no idea what's actually true" camp.
• DenisM 6y ago
  Great. Can we also discuss now how recycling paper hurts climate? Modern landfills are airtight, so buried paper is sequestered carbon. Less buried paper - less sequestration.
  • treyp 6y ago
    isn't sequestering carbon a good thing?
    • XCSme 6y ago
      I think that's what he tried to say, if you recycle paper the carbon gets somehow released. But, in theory, the recycled paper will still come out as paper, thus carbon will still be there.
      • DenisM 6y ago
        > in theory, the recycled paper will still come out as paper, thus carbon will still be there. If paper never gets recycled it will continue accumulating in the landfill at a fast pace, so more carbon gets trapped over time. If paper gets recycled the amount of captured carbon will be that trapped in the paper currently circulating. Even if some paper gets eventually trashed, it will not be at the same rate. Recycling paper harms climate.
        • XCSme 6y ago
          But what about the trees cut down to make new paper? As more new paper is needed if less is recycled.
          • DenisM 6y ago
            That's the whole point of carbon sequestration: grow a tree, cut it down, bury it, grow a new tree in the same place.
            • 6y ago
• rogerb 6y ago
  I'd love to see a class action lawsuit keeping the people who lied accountable for the amount of additional waste in effort, resources that are used to separate and collect these separate streams. Stuff like this (h/t @neltnerb): >>In almost all locations, PLA, "compostable plastic" (often labeled number 7 or 0 for marketing) is not only not recyclable but actively contaminates compost and recycling plants. I see all these places using "compostable plastic" because they think it's more environmentally friendly. It's a noble goal, it makes me so sad to see. So many groups would have standing to sue here...
  • pessimizer 6y ago
    > I'd love to see a class action lawsuit keeping the people who lied accountable for the amount of additional waste in effort, resources that are used to separate and collect these separate streams. The minuscule punishment that can be visited on the people involved in things like this won't clean up a molecule of the damage done, and won't be a deterrent for people who would do it in future (or who are doing similar things now.) Revenge isn't a cure, executing murderers never brings people back to life. The problem is a system that gives a small number of people the power to cause such widespread damage for a relatively tiny amount of personal benefit. The amount of damage that has been done for a $10K bribe, or to keep a $150K/yr job, etc. is immeasurable. It's not scalable to track down or filter out people who will put their personal security or comfort ahead of yours, or your entire town's. We have to accept that the way that power is distributed is dangerously uneven, and consciously prevent that. Also, let's not kid ourselves. This story will fade and be forgotten, and the practices will continue. The ability to stop powerful people from doing what they want to do isn't dependent on the consequences of what they do, but on the power that you have to stop them. Power comes from solidarity. They have it, through their command structure, and we don't. The American mind has retreated into various competing fantasies and myths; there's no chance for solidarity among the victims of these types of material harms.
    • rogerb 6y ago
      Its (obviously) not about the renumeration of any individual, but about accountability of the source. There are several examples - Tabacco, Asbestos, Bopal, Oil, Medication, ... where billions of dollars of fines assessed against the sources, not exactly small numbers.
• m0zg 6y ago
  IIRC it's been a lie for quite a while where I live. It used to be that PNW "recyclables" were just shipped to China where I strongly suspect they were promptly landfilled after payment was collected. But China stopped taking our trash years ago, so now they are landfilled in the US. Ironically, it's likely less harmful to the environment overall, since you don't have to ship it first, and the US is likely to have more rigorous environmental standards for landfills.
• aaron695 6y ago
  I'm sick of stupid people. This was never a secret. If you were dumb enough to think recycling works for anything other than aluminium you are the problem. Penn and Tell even did a Bullshit, for pre internet times. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/ ( although it was a awful episode )
  • the_cat_kittles 6y ago
    guess you are stupid, since it works for pp, hdpe, e waste as well (i literally do that for a living)
  • fsflover 6y ago
    Most of people are "dumb enough" to believe what TV says, because they expect the government should put in jail everyone who openly lies for profit.
    • macinjosh 6y ago
      Exactly. Too many people see the government’s role to be their parent and protect them from every bad thing in the world. Grow up folks. If everyone who lied for their own gain were to be sent to prison we’d have no politicians left in government. Come to think of it we would all probably be in jail at some point. Maybe just don’t believe everything you hear.
      • fsflover 6y ago
        But if you have to do everything yourself, check everything in the world yourself, defend yourself, why on earth do you need government at all? I think those people rightfully expect that from the government, because no one can be aware of every single thing.
        • macinjosh 6y ago
          “why on earth do you need government at all?” Bingo. You don’t. A government can’t protect you from everything either and in fact in many cases causes more problems for people. Just 2 examples of an endless number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study https://reason.com/2020/09/10/a-nebraska-county-took-his-25000-property-to-settle-a-986-tax-debt-now-the-u-s-supreme-court-could-get-involved/ https://reason.com/2020/09/10/a-nebraska-county-took-his-250... Life is a risk. Nothing can change that.
• dgellow 6y ago
  I have difficulties to understand if that's US specific or also a problem in Europe and the rest of the world. For example, I'm reading this article from 2011 that mentions that 77% of Japan's plastic is recycled: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/japan-leads-field-plastic-recycling https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/japan-le... Is that complete bullshit too, or is something possible to actually achieve, just not in the US?
  • lucumo 6y ago
    This probably depends on the country, and perhaps even municipality, but plastic is recycled properly here (.nl). Plastic, drinking cartons and metals are collected in the same container. These three are separated using magnets[1] and infrared scanners. The plastics are melted down to little pellets that can be used to create new products. A common example are shampoo bottles. This video is in Dutch, but it has some overview of these sorting machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf--8o3yD6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf--8o3yD6g Based on this video about plastic recycling in Germany, I think the situation is very similar there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_fUpP-hq3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_fUpP-hq3A The video is in English. The plastics that are recycled there seem to be PET, PP and HDPE. I'm absolutely in love with all the neat little tricks these machines use to sort the stuff. From simple ones like sieves and centrifuges, to fans and advanced imaging stuff. It's beautiful. [1] Even aluminium can be sorted with magnets by doing some magic.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    I suspect "recycling" there means something like "separated and sent to Thailand to fuel cement kilns".
  • adsljfl3 6y ago
    I think one of the comments in here mentions that Japan only accepts PET plastic which apparently doesn't have these issues. Regardless the main issue is that the US is not strict about how we label things or regulate things related to recycling. There is only a small subset of plastics that are recyclable.
• tom_mellior 6y ago
  Um, what's the deal with editing the headline? The original asserts a statement. It may or may not be true. But why would it benefit HN readers to turn this assertion into a question?
  • DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    no deal - the submission bookmarklet JS[1] automatically fills in the title from the html meta: <title>Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted Recycling To Sell More Plastic : NPR</title> [1] javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title) https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURICompo...
    • tom_mellior 6y ago
      Ah thanks, that explains it. So it's partly NPR's fault for using a title tag different from the headline. I guess I was also confused because I think I had also seen the duplicate submission that used the headline, not the title tag, so I though this one was changed. But that bookmarklet is also at fault, since at the minimum submissions are required to strip out the site's name if it occurs in the title, so leaving in the ": NPR" bit is a bug in this automated approach. So some amount of human post-processing will always be needed. And while submissions are expected to keep the original title, there is also a rule that egregious clickbait like the question in the title tag should be removed (which has now been done!).
• TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Just thought I would share an album I made from a trip to a Bay Area recycling facility. I shot a bunch of slow mo of recycling machinery. It’s pretty crazy that they can’t sort black plastic because the machine relies on IR light to sense plastic type. We’ve got all these machine learning engineers in the area and probably not so many of them are working on real practical solutions to problems like trash sorting. https://imgur.com/gallery/IK5zKkO https://imgur.com/gallery/IK5zKkO
• zests 6y ago
  Here's another one about paper recycling that I read in a book once. Surprisingly it's not discussed very much at all and its hard for me to judge how accurate it is. "Recycling paper is not worth it. The paper we use is grown specifically to be harvested and used in paper. The act of growing and using this paper is a form of carbon sequestration. When we recycle paper, we lose out in an opportunity to sequester more carbon from the air. Landfills prevent the carbon in paper from re-entering the carbon cycle." I think the most convincing argument against this is that the tree farms take up land that could be used for other purposes.
• tylorr 6y ago
  I remember hearing some time ago that sorting at the facility was going to be more efficient than pre-sorting at home because we can't trust everyone to sort properly so sorting at the facility was required anyway. Is this not the case anymore? I see many other comments saying that comingled recycling is bad.
• mgh2 6y ago
  Well China did buy it for recycling, but since that is changing, the corporate narrative needs to change too. https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/why-china-import-half-world-used-plastic.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/why-china-import-half-w...
• hosh 6y ago
  Food waste in landfills is arguably a much bigger problem than plastics being dumped into landfills. The acid produced from the decomposing organics eats away plastics and metals, creating a toxic leachate. Landfills try to contain that, but it is not contained 100%. That stuff leaks out into soil, potentially into aquifers. Furthermore the methane gases can build up in the landfill with potentially explosive consequences. Many landfills add vertical pipes to vent it, but it isn't captured for later use, contributing to greenhouse gases. Contrast that with being able to process food waste onsite (or at least the neighborhood level) using the carbon cycle -- vermicomposting and conventional composting. They feed the plant, and unlike oil-based fertilizers, they help build up soil fertility long-term. There are many more actions an individual can take that contributes towards the health of the ecology. I think a lot of people latch onto recycling because it is one of the few things people know how to do that they think contributes towards a better ecology. But there are so many more impactful things individuals and communities can do, that does not depend upon forcing large megacorps to do the right thing.
• einpoklum 6y ago
  > Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. So isn't a part of the article only relevant to the US, and other countries which were exporting plastic trash rather than actually recycling/using for derivative products? > Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. > Recycling plastic is "costly," By now, we should be well enough educated to say: "What do you mean by expensive or costly?" Does it mean... * Costs a lot of money in the current socio-economic order? * Requires a lot of human effort? * Requires a lot of electricity / other form of energy? * Has a high carbon footprint (by some complex figuring)? * Involves a process emitting pollutants? If it's just the monetary cost, then in a sense - that doesn't matter. Just rearrange society so that either this is funded (or a non-monetary economy). If it's energy use - maybe it's worth it and it could be arranged to be done using solar collectors in the desert or whatever. And so on.
• lumberingjack 6y ago
  When you recycle near me you're mostly just enriching China our local recycle facility does not usually recycle. Only when the recycle machinehas got capacity do we actually take the recycling to any type of recycle facility. Most of the time just gets thrown in the trash dump or it gets shipped overseas so that somebody else can sort through it. Along the way a lot of it mysteriously ends up in the ocean.