4 ms·

I think it should be illegal for waste disposal to be as intransparent as it is now. I live in Germany and always considered our Recycling Practices as highly v

I think it should be illegal for waste disposal to be as intransparent as it is now. I live in Germany and always considered our Recycling Practices as highly valuable, until I was contracted to build a project for an industrial waste processing company, which led me to realize that our system is 60% virtue signalling, 35% political corruption and 5% useful. The problem, as they've described, if you were intellectually honest is really not about how much you can recycle, but more about how you can burn things cleanly by sorting stuff as best as possible. Have two bins, dry waste and wet waste, everything else should be handled at the waste management plant, as they have to sort anyway, but wetting materials that could otherwise burn cleanly and efficiently raises the price and makes automated sorting much harder and more expensive. If the waste management company can recycle anything for profit, they will absolutely do so, but forcing them to do so at cost for materials that nobody wants to buy because the material is in low demand just shifts the problem in the pipeline to the landfill after you've spent energy on trying to recycle it.

xwolfi 6y ago
I ve worked in waste management where we tried to make them transparent against their will. The reason why large recyclers, burning plants manager and all the other companies taking your trash and trying to do someth with it is that the margins are barely worth it, nobody want to raises prices and there s no much they can do to even give an environmentally safe disposal, they re not built as innovative engineering companies but as inherited old school mafia-like gangs. We found out huge over pricing on our clients thanks to large data mining, and they confessed that without lying on their contracts and quantity they process they d close the door. They were fine losing our client if that meant honestly weighting waste and pricing at the contract. Our client was the largest supermarket chain in my country, with 800 stores: they couldnt even afford real priced waste management because why, it s not their priority. They only hired us to fuck their providers into submitting to loss making. That s waste management, and my more idealist "liberal" young colleagues didnt last long in a company that was trying to talk to every side. It s so much easier to go to environmental think tanks that talk abt recycling coffee cups than make a supermarket company accept to lose money with no environmental benefit for the sake of just keeping the sector alive and legal. In Italy, waste management isnt even done legally and we had to politely decline to go there to help too ahah

xwolfi 6y ago

I ve worked in waste management where we tried to make them transparent against their will. The reason why large recyclers, burning plants manager and all the other companies taking your trash and trying to do someth with it is that the margins are barely worth it, nobody want to raises prices and there s no much they can do to even give an environmentally safe disposal, they re not built as innovative engineering companies but as inherited old school mafia-like gangs. We found out huge over pricing on our clients thanks to large data mining, and they confessed that without lying on their contracts and quantity they process they d close the door. They were fine losing our client if that meant honestly weighting waste and pricing at the contract. Our client was the largest supermarket chain in my country, with 800 stores: they couldnt even afford real priced waste management because why, it s not their priority. They only hired us to fuck their providers into submitting to loss making. That s waste management, and my more idealist "liberal" young colleagues didnt last long in a company that was trying to talk to every side. It s so much easier to go to environmental think tanks that talk abt recycling coffee cups than make a supermarket company accept to lose money with no environmental benefit for the sake of just keeping the sector alive and legal. In Italy, waste management isnt even done legally and we had to politely decline to go there to help too ahah