8 ms·

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 ol

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.)
- tootahe45 6y ago
  Doesn't matter how stupid it is, once a govt employee's job depends on it good luck getting rid of it.
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    Do you have anything to back this up besides snark?
    - asquabventured 6y ago
      The real world?
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    I've seen several municipalities try to reduce how much they recycle. And everytime it was brought back by popular demand. The issue is that the green movement has focused on recycling, and lots of people think it's morally good to recycle despite all the science saying aluminum is the only clear win.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    As opposed to the company employees making it?
    - macinjosh 6y ago
      Laying off government employees is significantly more difficult than laying off someone in the private sector.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  It makes consumers feel better about using single-use containers. It was really not very long ago that my university cafeteria had real plates and silverware and just washed it. Now it's all faux-compostable plastic and polystyrene for some unfathomable reason which all has to get thrown in the trash even though they have "compost bins" that I know from calling around can't even handle the "compostable" plastic provided in the cafeteria. Probably literally millions of containers thrown in the trash over the last fifteen years because they didn't want to pay a dishwasher... just doesn't even make economic sense...
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Recycling is a hack to try to fix the downside of another hack. The other hack is that the cost of trash disposal is artificially depressed to reduce the incentive to dispose of refuse by illegal dumping. But this means refuse is overproduced. Recycling is an attempt to reduce this increased volume of refuse going into landfills. The better strategy would be to charge a fee, up front, for all goods that reflects their cost of disposal. This would be used to subsidize disposal in whatever way was most economical (recycling, landfilling, incineration). It would discourage overpackaging and encourage products that were easier to dispose of.
  - franciscop 6y ago
    A fee up-front like _taxes_ (VAT)? It is the government that subsidizes the disposal, and does it through the taxes that they charge everyone, so in fact exactly what you are saying it's happening. If the tax depended on e.g. volume of packaging vs volume of content, or weight of packaging vs weight of content, that might be a different story and more useful. But even then not all trash is done equal, a paper envelope or cardboard is way better than a plastic one, even if it's bigger/heavier.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      > a paper envelope or cardboard is way better than a plastic one, even if it's bigger/heavier. Why is it better? Because the plastic comes from fossil fuels that cause CO2 emissions? The solution there is a CO2 tax on fossil fuels, not trying to special case the waste disposal fee.
      - thayne 6y ago
        Because it decomposes, instead of remaining unchanged in the ground for thousands of years.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        And that is an advantage... why?
flatline 6y ago
Living in a city, we get two bins: trash and commingled recycling. They get picked up once a week. Anything that is not obviously “garbage” goes into recycling. I believe that most but not all of it can be recycled. I have no idea what they actually do with it, or why they do it this way, but the logistics of pickup are dead simple.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Are you sure the recycling acceptance rules are broad? In my town, they'd rather not get anything other than #1 or #2 plastics and don't want some other things like boxboard (or pasteboard; cereal boxes and the like) or aluminum foil.
  - snazz 6y ago
    Where I live they don't want waxed cardboard (pizza boxes and similar) or aluminum foil, but everything else you mentioned is acceptable. It clearly depends on the municipality.
  - flatline 6y ago
    They are broad, but it’s been years since I looked and I am confident I am not always in compliance. But at the end of the day they take it away, and there is not room in the trash for everything. I am obviously not acting in very good faith, but theN my wife will put anything into the recycling. I lived in Boulder years ago and they would ding you for mistakes, I always wondered what level of effort was required to do that.
  - kencausey 6y ago
    In my small city the recycling program was cancelled earlier this year but the restriction on plastic was #1 or #2 and only bottles. The local university had a drop-off location obviously intended for use by students and staff, but it wasn't closed off in anyway. They had signs that specified what was acceptable and had separate containers for each category. I was never quite certain from the signs but it appeared that they accepted all plastic as long as it had a recycling mark (actually it said #1-#7 which seemed to me to be all, but I could be wrong.) My assumption at the time was that they sent their recycling somewhere else other than the city provided recycling program. However, that drop-off location was removed soon after the city program was cancelled. I have to assume that what the recycling company would accept was more of a negotiation than a sign of what could actually be effectively recycled.
hesdeadjim 6y ago
I get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass. These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed. It might just be that burying it in the ground for the next few hundred years is the best solution, and through laws attempt to curb the explosive growth of plastic use.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.
  - criddell 6y ago
    Aren't we running out of sand too? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Concrete requires river sand because of its texture. AFAIK, desert sand is quite abundant and perfectly suited to being melted down into glass.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        What matters for glass is impurity content, in particular iron, I think, if you want clear glass.
      - dathinab 6y ago
        The main sand used for glass is quartz sand. I don't know if desert sand can be used. Through quartz sand is still widely available. The reason we recycle glass bottles is that it's much more energy efficient to create new glass from recycled glass and it's not to hard to sort/separate glass so recycling glass makes sense for reasons which are unrelated to how "rare" the resource it's made from is. Note that this is only true for glass bottles (or similar), things like window glass is made from different sand mixes and should not be placed into the glass recycling bin at all. I have no idea if you can recycle window glass (as e.g. non window glass) or similar. But it's not part of the glass bottle recycling process and is seen as a form of contamination if placed in to large amounts in the recycling glass. (as far as I remember)
neltnerb 6y ago
No, plastic degrades each time it is recycled. They knew that, every materials scientist knew that, and it is just not possible to fully reclaim recycled plastic. What really pisses me off is the use of the recycling number as marketing. Which is still ongoing and being modernized. Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plants, that stuff is worse than trash because it's also misleading about how to dispose of it and makes the store look green when it's really just making things worse. 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. The stores that pick those containers do so because they want to project an environmentally conscious image, and the "eco" marketing on this utter trash gets them to pay top dollar for those containers instead of just using paper. I feel so bad for these stores, it takes a PhD to dispose of this misleading and dangerous material properly. As a normal consumer, if I saw that logo and "compostable plastic" guess where I'd throw it. Compost? Recycling? Probably one or the other right? Wrong, if I put it in the compost I make the compost produced from the food scraps contaminated and unsafe for use. If I put it in the recycling it gets melted in with other polymers and contaminates them, degrading the other plastic even faster if the whole batch doesn't need to be thrown away outright. Edit: The one saving grace is that I know that where I live trash is incinerated. So at least I feel less bad throwing this stuff in the trash. It was just oil that made a temporary detour as a container before being burned for electricity. Still, I'd rather they just use unadulterated paper (no little plastic spouts glued on), glass, and aluminum which are all easily recycled or burn clean.
- hosh 6y ago
  > 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. I don't know the answer to this question -- have you heard of any work using fungi or "eco-vats" to break down plastics like this?
anigbrowl 6y ago
Why are we always blaming the public for being easily deceived and not the people who invest large sums of financial and political capital in the deception?
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Partly, because the deception worked. Partly, because tech crowds lean libertarian, and interpreting all issues as individual issues requiring individual solutions is a very libertarian response.
  - djmips 6y ago
    I'd guess that a majority of the tech crowd wasn't fooled. This isn't exactly news if you follow tech related stories. So I think there is a tendency to blame the non tech people for not also being aware of something that was 'obvious'.
jrochkind1 6y ago
The OP suggests: "There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out." Asking the consumer to sort out hundreds of different plastic types -- to then be picked up by a truck that has hundreds of compartments to keep them separate somehow? Or dropped off at a facility with hundreds of labelled bins? -- does not seem any more feasible than having a "single-stream" sorting facility do it. Other kinds of recycling, that aren't plastic, are somewhat more feasible than plastic, even if not currently economically profitable. Plastic recycling particularly, according to the info in the article which matches other things I've learned, is just pretty much imaginary.
- ouid 6y ago
  Infinitely less feasible, even. I swear it's like half of these commenters have never had to deal with a user.
ouid 6y ago
The problem with recycling is that it's stupid. Our trash bags are plastic. It's not worse for the environment to put some extra plastic inside the plastic bag that you use to throw away your trash. Recycling is for materials which are harder to process from the environment than from recycling. Plastic is precisely the opposite. It's essentially a byproduct of refining oil. It's so cheap to make that you would be hard pressed to find a single thing that could be replaced by plastic that hasn't been.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> 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. It's ridiculous to see the increasing burden put on consumers wrt. recycling. In the city I come from (Kraków, Poland), we started with simple categories (AFAIR: trash, glass, metal/plastic), and accrued new over time, along with extra requirements. These days, as my family tells me, they have ~7-9 categories and recyclables have to be washed. Which is ridiculous. Even if everyone went along with it, that's literally wasting every citzen's time where it could be done efficiently, in a central place, by salaried workers. On top of that, it creates a water waste issue - as people wash their plastic/metal/glass containers in their sinks, where again, it could be done more efficiently at a central facility. But of course, and quite wisely, people at this point don't bother recycling much.

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.)
tootahe45 6y ago
Doesn't matter how stupid it is, once a govt employee's job depends on it good luck getting rid of it.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  Do you have anything to back this up besides snark?
  - asquabventured 6y ago
    The real world?
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  I've seen several municipalities try to reduce how much they recycle. And everytime it was brought back by popular demand. The issue is that the green movement has focused on recycling, and lots of people think it's morally good to recycle despite all the science saying aluminum is the only clear win.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  As opposed to the company employees making it?
  - macinjosh 6y ago
    Laying off government employees is significantly more difficult than laying off someone in the private sector.
neltnerb 6y ago
It makes consumers feel better about using single-use containers. It was really not very long ago that my university cafeteria had real plates and silverware and just washed it. Now it's all faux-compostable plastic and polystyrene for some unfathomable reason which all has to get thrown in the trash even though they have "compost bins" that I know from calling around can't even handle the "compostable" plastic provided in the cafeteria. Probably literally millions of containers thrown in the trash over the last fifteen years because they didn't want to pay a dishwasher... just doesn't even make economic sense...
pfdietz 6y ago
Recycling is a hack to try to fix the downside of another hack. The other hack is that the cost of trash disposal is artificially depressed to reduce the incentive to dispose of refuse by illegal dumping. But this means refuse is overproduced. Recycling is an attempt to reduce this increased volume of refuse going into landfills. The better strategy would be to charge a fee, up front, for all goods that reflects their cost of disposal. This would be used to subsidize disposal in whatever way was most economical (recycling, landfilling, incineration). It would discourage overpackaging and encourage products that were easier to dispose of.
- franciscop 6y ago
  A fee up-front like _taxes_ (VAT)? It is the government that subsidizes the disposal, and does it through the taxes that they charge everyone, so in fact exactly what you are saying it's happening. If the tax depended on e.g. volume of packaging vs volume of content, or weight of packaging vs weight of content, that might be a different story and more useful. But even then not all trash is done equal, a paper envelope or cardboard is way better than a plastic one, even if it's bigger/heavier.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    > a paper envelope or cardboard is way better than a plastic one, even if it's bigger/heavier. Why is it better? Because the plastic comes from fossil fuels that cause CO2 emissions? The solution there is a CO2 tax on fossil fuels, not trying to special case the waste disposal fee.
    - thayne 6y ago
      Because it decomposes, instead of remaining unchanged in the ground for thousands of years.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        And that is an advantage... why?

flatline 6y ago

Living in a city, we get two bins: trash and commingled recycling. They get picked up once a week. Anything that is not obviously “garbage” goes into recycling. I believe that most but not all of it can be recycled. I have no idea what they actually do with it, or why they do it this way, but the logistics of pickup are dead simple.

maxerickson 6y ago
Are you sure the recycling acceptance rules are broad? In my town, they'd rather not get anything other than #1 or #2 plastics and don't want some other things like boxboard (or pasteboard; cereal boxes and the like) or aluminum foil.
- snazz 6y ago
  Where I live they don't want waxed cardboard (pizza boxes and similar) or aluminum foil, but everything else you mentioned is acceptable. It clearly depends on the municipality.
- flatline 6y ago
  They are broad, but it’s been years since I looked and I am confident I am not always in compliance. But at the end of the day they take it away, and there is not room in the trash for everything. I am obviously not acting in very good faith, but theN my wife will put anything into the recycling. I lived in Boulder years ago and they would ding you for mistakes, I always wondered what level of effort was required to do that.
- kencausey 6y ago
  In my small city the recycling program was cancelled earlier this year but the restriction on plastic was #1 or #2 and only bottles. The local university had a drop-off location obviously intended for use by students and staff, but it wasn't closed off in anyway. They had signs that specified what was acceptable and had separate containers for each category. I was never quite certain from the signs but it appeared that they accepted all plastic as long as it had a recycling mark (actually it said #1-#7 which seemed to me to be all, but I could be wrong.) My assumption at the time was that they sent their recycling somewhere else other than the city provided recycling program. However, that drop-off location was removed soon after the city program was cancelled. I have to assume that what the recycling company would accept was more of a negotiation than a sign of what could actually be effectively recycled.

hesdeadjim 6y ago

I get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass. These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed. It might just be that burying it in the ground for the next few hundred years is the best solution, and through laws attempt to curb the explosive growth of plastic use.

xyzzyz 6y ago
Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.
- criddell 6y ago
  Aren't we running out of sand too? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Concrete requires river sand because of its texture. AFAIK, desert sand is quite abundant and perfectly suited to being melted down into glass.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      What matters for glass is impurity content, in particular iron, I think, if you want clear glass.
    - dathinab 6y ago
      The main sand used for glass is quartz sand. I don't know if desert sand can be used. Through quartz sand is still widely available. The reason we recycle glass bottles is that it's much more energy efficient to create new glass from recycled glass and it's not to hard to sort/separate glass so recycling glass makes sense for reasons which are unrelated to how "rare" the resource it's made from is. Note that this is only true for glass bottles (or similar), things like window glass is made from different sand mixes and should not be placed into the glass recycling bin at all. I have no idea if you can recycle window glass (as e.g. non window glass) or similar. But it's not part of the glass bottle recycling process and is seen as a form of contamination if placed in to large amounts in the recycling glass. (as far as I remember)

neltnerb 6y ago

No, plastic degrades each time it is recycled. They knew that, every materials scientist knew that, and it is just not possible to fully reclaim recycled plastic. What really pisses me off is the use of the recycling number as marketing. Which is still ongoing and being modernized. Leave a complaint card any time you see compostable plastic being used in a city that doesn't have specialized industrial composting plants, that stuff is worse than trash because it's also misleading about how to dispose of it and makes the store look green when it's really just making things worse. 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. The stores that pick those containers do so because they want to project an environmentally conscious image, and the "eco" marketing on this utter trash gets them to pay top dollar for those containers instead of just using paper. I feel so bad for these stores, it takes a PhD to dispose of this misleading and dangerous material properly. As a normal consumer, if I saw that logo and "compostable plastic" guess where I'd throw it. Compost? Recycling? Probably one or the other right? Wrong, if I put it in the compost I make the compost produced from the food scraps contaminated and unsafe for use. If I put it in the recycling it gets melted in with other polymers and contaminates them, degrading the other plastic even faster if the whole batch doesn't need to be thrown away outright. Edit: The one saving grace is that I know that where I live trash is incinerated. So at least I feel less bad throwing this stuff in the trash. It was just oil that made a temporary detour as a container before being burned for electricity. Still, I'd rather they just use unadulterated paper (no little plastic spouts glued on), glass, and aluminum which are all easily recycled or burn clean.

hosh 6y ago
> 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. I don't know the answer to this question -- have you heard of any work using fungi or "eco-vats" to break down plastics like this?

anigbrowl 6y ago

Why are we always blaming the public for being easily deceived and not the people who invest large sums of financial and political capital in the deception?

MereInterest 6y ago
Partly, because the deception worked. Partly, because tech crowds lean libertarian, and interpreting all issues as individual issues requiring individual solutions is a very libertarian response.
- djmips 6y ago
  I'd guess that a majority of the tech crowd wasn't fooled. This isn't exactly news if you follow tech related stories. So I think there is a tendency to blame the non tech people for not also being aware of something that was 'obvious'.

jrochkind1 6y ago

The OP suggests: "There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out." Asking the consumer to sort out hundreds of different plastic types -- to then be picked up by a truck that has hundreds of compartments to keep them separate somehow? Or dropped off at a facility with hundreds of labelled bins? -- does not seem any more feasible than having a "single-stream" sorting facility do it. Other kinds of recycling, that aren't plastic, are somewhat more feasible than plastic, even if not currently economically profitable. Plastic recycling particularly, according to the info in the article which matches other things I've learned, is just pretty much imaginary.

ouid 6y ago
Infinitely less feasible, even. I swear it's like half of these commenters have never had to deal with a user.

ouid 6y ago

The problem with recycling is that it's stupid. Our trash bags are plastic. It's not worse for the environment to put some extra plastic inside the plastic bag that you use to throw away your trash. Recycling is for materials which are harder to process from the environment than from recycling. Plastic is precisely the opposite. It's essentially a byproduct of refining oil. It's so cheap to make that you would be hard pressed to find a single thing that could be replaced by plastic that hasn't been.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> 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. It's ridiculous to see the increasing burden put on consumers wrt. recycling. In the city I come from (Kraków, Poland), we started with simple categories (AFAIR: trash, glass, metal/plastic), and accrued new over time, along with extra requirements. These days, as my family tells me, they have ~7-9 categories and recyclables have to be washed. Which is ridiculous. Even if everyone went along with it, that's literally wasting every citzen's time where it could be done efficiently, in a central place, by salaried workers. On top of that, it creates a water waste issue - as people wash their plastic/metal/glass containers in their sinks, where again, it could be done more efficiently at a central facility. But of course, and quite wisely, people at this point don't bother recycling much.