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"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wante

"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wanted to acknowledge it because they spent decades training the population that recycling is important and they didn't want to undo those years of hard work. It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream. Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath. Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers. Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword 2 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycli...

mwint 4y ago
Huh, this is an interesting question I’ve never thought of: Why wouldn’t it always be more efficient to do single-stream recycling, with giant blue bins for people to throw recyclable stuff in, and have manual sorting at facilities? If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?
- nico 4y ago
  On the same line, isn’t it also more expensive for humanity as a whole to keep throwing stuff away just to make and buy more?
  - lazide 4y ago
    So far, looks like the answer is a clear no. It’s pretty cheap to make stuff at scale. Cleaning something to the point it can be reused safely (without knowing what the prior person did to it), or disassembling something damaged or broken to the point it can be melted down and recycled, is really hard and time consuming. About the only things it makes sense to do this with are stuff made out of highly valuable metals, or are very large (aka big pieces), or where we don’t mind burning the non-recyclable stuff most of the time (aka crushed cars).
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    The primary cost in the vast majority of products today is labor. Anything that takes less time and less people to make (eg. oil; cheap plastic goods; software; movies) gets cheap and immensely profitable. Anything that requires lots of labor (eg. Lamborghinis & other hand-crafted luxury goods; therapy; health care; college; homes) becomes super expensive. The cost of the actual materials is usually rounding error. This holds as long as you pay people, but I doubt many folks would jump on slavery as a solution to our environmental woes.
    - deadfoxygrandpa 4y ago
      get this: the cost of the raw materials themselves are also primarily in the labor it takes to locate, extract, and process them. it's labor all the way down.
    - nico 4y ago
      What’s the cost of environmental impact? It seems like we are missing some costs in our calculations. That labor is not going to be able to keep producing stuff if their environment is wrecked. So what’s the cost of that?
- yostrovs 4y ago
  When people throw paper, beer cans with some beer left over and other bottles together, the paper becomes soiled and useless. Glass breaks during loading/unloading of the truck and can't be separated out anymore. So the problem is that you have to separate initially.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Maybe then a good category system would be “wet” and “dry”?
  - landemva 4y ago
    Yes, glass must be separated else it breaks and contaminates everything. For glass to have value, it must be sorted by color (before transport so breakage is with like color). Having worked on machines at landfills, I learned much recycling is a scam to make people feel good. Separated items in well-run scrap sites do get recycled, though that is the exception. The landfill cells are not cheap to construct though it is straightforward. In some States with tire reclamation fees to prevent disposal of whole tires, the fees pay for the dump to buy a shredder, stacker, and wheel loader to gradually sprinkle smaller tire pieces into the same place the whole tire would have gone. After seeing many of these sites, I have concluded that burning most trash to make electricity would be appropriate.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Single-stream recycling was basically a greenwashing scam enabled by the ability of supply chains to hide where the product ends up. The plastics weren't being recycled; they were being shipped to China, where peasant children would sift through them for anything of value and the rest would be left in the fields. I'd recommend the documentary "Plastic China" for an expose on that; it's the reason that the Chinese government has banned new garbage imports: https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina I highly suspect that recycling is in fact a terrible economic idea, and it's not at all cost effective to have people sort their garbage so it can be recovered for materials worth pennies anyway. The problem is that you cannot generally tell civilized affluent consumers that their consumption habits are going to turn this planet into the world of Wall-E, without them insisting we do something about this. The real product being sold was the myth of a sustainable future, just as it is with most other industries.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- celestialcheese 4y ago
  Contamination is an issue - another comment mentioned beer in the paper, and that's pretty accurate. You get paid based on the quality of material you can send to your downstream buyers, single stream stock has significantly more contamination from poorly cleaned containers on average than multi-stream. But another part is just the sheer volume of material. There's no time to do manual sorting other than basic visual inspection to make sure things like bowling balls and concrete get to the sorters. Optical sorters are incredibly cool, but only just now getting to a place where they can work fast enough and accurate enough to make a difference [3]. Separating the material apart gives the machines the best shot at sorting; less work they'll need to do. Even if humans only get 80% of the sorting right at collection, it's significantly better than no sorting at all, as it gives the machines time to pick and blow the material to proper channels for recovery and resale. See [1] [2] for videos of NYC recycling plants to see the scale. Videos don't do it justice, and when you tour different plants, it puts the complexity of the problem into perspective. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivu0HCdqEHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivu0HCdqEHs 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHGKZL8_6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHGKZL8_6Q 3 - https://www.recyclingproductnews.com/article/35841/the-latest-optical-sorters-for-recycling-are-fast-acccurate-and-versatile https://www.recyclingproductnews.com/article/35841/the-lates...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem No, it boils down to companies actually putting in some goddamned effort to use actually fucking recyclable and recycled materials. Anything else is a goddamned side show.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> "Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't. > According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.… > China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged… > “After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said. https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article/3178077/how-mainland-chinas-waste-import-ban-2018-impacted https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article...

mwint 4y ago

Huh, this is an interesting question I’ve never thought of: Why wouldn’t it always be more efficient to do single-stream recycling, with giant blue bins for people to throw recyclable stuff in, and have manual sorting at facilities? If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?

nico 4y ago
On the same line, isn’t it also more expensive for humanity as a whole to keep throwing stuff away just to make and buy more?
- lazide 4y ago
  So far, looks like the answer is a clear no. It’s pretty cheap to make stuff at scale. Cleaning something to the point it can be reused safely (without knowing what the prior person did to it), or disassembling something damaged or broken to the point it can be melted down and recycled, is really hard and time consuming. About the only things it makes sense to do this with are stuff made out of highly valuable metals, or are very large (aka big pieces), or where we don’t mind burning the non-recyclable stuff most of the time (aka crushed cars).
- nostrademons 4y ago
  The primary cost in the vast majority of products today is labor. Anything that takes less time and less people to make (eg. oil; cheap plastic goods; software; movies) gets cheap and immensely profitable. Anything that requires lots of labor (eg. Lamborghinis & other hand-crafted luxury goods; therapy; health care; college; homes) becomes super expensive. The cost of the actual materials is usually rounding error. This holds as long as you pay people, but I doubt many folks would jump on slavery as a solution to our environmental woes.
  - deadfoxygrandpa 4y ago
    get this: the cost of the raw materials themselves are also primarily in the labor it takes to locate, extract, and process them. it's labor all the way down.
  - nico 4y ago
    What’s the cost of environmental impact? It seems like we are missing some costs in our calculations. That labor is not going to be able to keep producing stuff if their environment is wrecked. So what’s the cost of that?
yostrovs 4y ago
When people throw paper, beer cans with some beer left over and other bottles together, the paper becomes soiled and useless. Glass breaks during loading/unloading of the truck and can't be separated out anymore. So the problem is that you have to separate initially.
- mwint 4y ago
  Maybe then a good category system would be “wet” and “dry”?
- landemva 4y ago
  Yes, glass must be separated else it breaks and contaminates everything. For glass to have value, it must be sorted by color (before transport so breakage is with like color). Having worked on machines at landfills, I learned much recycling is a scam to make people feel good. Separated items in well-run scrap sites do get recycled, though that is the exception. The landfill cells are not cheap to construct though it is straightforward. In some States with tire reclamation fees to prevent disposal of whole tires, the fees pay for the dump to buy a shredder, stacker, and wheel loader to gradually sprinkle smaller tire pieces into the same place the whole tire would have gone. After seeing many of these sites, I have concluded that burning most trash to make electricity would be appropriate.
nostrademons 4y ago
Single-stream recycling was basically a greenwashing scam enabled by the ability of supply chains to hide where the product ends up. The plastics weren't being recycled; they were being shipped to China, where peasant children would sift through them for anything of value and the rest would be left in the fields. I'd recommend the documentary "Plastic China" for an expose on that; it's the reason that the Chinese government has banned new garbage imports: https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina I highly suspect that recycling is in fact a terrible economic idea, and it's not at all cost effective to have people sort their garbage so it can be recovered for materials worth pennies anyway. The problem is that you cannot generally tell civilized affluent consumers that their consumption habits are going to turn this planet into the world of Wall-E, without them insisting we do something about this. The real product being sold was the myth of a sustainable future, just as it is with most other industries.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
celestialcheese 4y ago
Contamination is an issue - another comment mentioned beer in the paper, and that's pretty accurate. You get paid based on the quality of material you can send to your downstream buyers, single stream stock has significantly more contamination from poorly cleaned containers on average than multi-stream. But another part is just the sheer volume of material. There's no time to do manual sorting other than basic visual inspection to make sure things like bowling balls and concrete get to the sorters. Optical sorters are incredibly cool, but only just now getting to a place where they can work fast enough and accurate enough to make a difference [3]. Separating the material apart gives the machines the best shot at sorting; less work they'll need to do. Even if humans only get 80% of the sorting right at collection, it's significantly better than no sorting at all, as it gives the machines time to pick and blow the material to proper channels for recovery and resale. See [1] [2] for videos of NYC recycling plants to see the scale. Videos don't do it justice, and when you tour different plants, it puts the complexity of the problem into perspective. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivu0HCdqEHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivu0HCdqEHs 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHGKZL8_6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHGKZL8_6Q 3 - https://www.recyclingproductnews.com/article/35841/the-latest-optical-sorters-for-recycling-are-fast-acccurate-and-versatile https://www.recyclingproductnews.com/article/35841/the-lates...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

> Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem No, it boils down to companies actually putting in some goddamned effort to use actually fucking recyclable and recycled materials. Anything else is a goddamned side show.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> "Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't. > According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.… > China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged… > “After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said. https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article/3178077/how-mainland-chinas-waste-import-ban-2018-impacted https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article...