4 ms·

Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with? Putting plastic in a landfill

Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with? Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them. Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient). I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.

alistairSH 4y ago
Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery. Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/glass https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...
- unnamed76ri 4y ago
  Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor. When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    Unfortunately, taxes and regulations seem to be the only mechanisms we have to price externalities into economic activity.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    How else would you regulate negative externalities? The goal is to build the externality into the price, which then gives incentive to move to less harmful packaging, etc. Spending any revenue on something useful is a secondary goal here. The war on drugs is a completely different situation.
- Bedon292 4y ago
  Prince William did the same with Glass. But also only takes 1 and 2 plastic now. My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.
briHass 4y ago
Agreed. I feel like I live in crazy land, when there's so much focus on banning plastic straws and bags. Then, only to replace them with paper straws coated with (likely) some horrific chemical that still fall apart or 'reusable' shopping bags that take 50x the amount of plastic/energy to manufacture and then take extra energy to clean. People could do far more to 'save the planet' by keeping their house at 65F in the Winter and 78F in the Summer, but that doesn't have the same virtuous feel as campaigning to ban 'evil' single-use plastics. Nobody will see you shiver/sweat in your house, so there's nothing to brag about.
- lupire 4y ago
  What are you doing to make your reusable bags dirty? They carry mostly packaged goods.
NovaVeles 4y ago
Back in 1989 - Dow Chemcial made a proposal. Even then, there was too many plastic type to sort out and contamination was a major issue. They had a realistic but somewhat defeatist solution. Just burn it all. Use it for heat and power, treat plastic as an intermediate step of oil and nothing more. Then figure out emissions capture technology so that it can be stored somehow. I don't agree with it entirely but I did like that it was an realistic approach to a complex problem.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  It's a form of energy storage, helpful for seasonal load leveling, or perhaps production of synfuels.

alistairSH 4y ago

Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery. Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.

enragedcacti 4y ago
FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/glass https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...
unnamed76ri 4y ago
Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor. When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?
- rjbwork 4y ago
  Unfortunately, taxes and regulations seem to be the only mechanisms we have to price externalities into economic activity.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  How else would you regulate negative externalities? The goal is to build the externality into the price, which then gives incentive to move to less harmful packaging, etc. Spending any revenue on something useful is a secondary goal here. The war on drugs is a completely different situation.
Bedon292 4y ago
Prince William did the same with Glass. But also only takes 1 and 2 plastic now. My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.

briHass 4y ago

Agreed. I feel like I live in crazy land, when there's so much focus on banning plastic straws and bags. Then, only to replace them with paper straws coated with (likely) some horrific chemical that still fall apart or 'reusable' shopping bags that take 50x the amount of plastic/energy to manufacture and then take extra energy to clean. People could do far more to 'save the planet' by keeping their house at 65F in the Winter and 78F in the Summer, but that doesn't have the same virtuous feel as campaigning to ban 'evil' single-use plastics. Nobody will see you shiver/sweat in your house, so there's nothing to brag about.

lupire 4y ago
What are you doing to make your reusable bags dirty? They carry mostly packaged goods.

NovaVeles 4y ago

Back in 1989 - Dow Chemcial made a proposal. Even then, there was too many plastic type to sort out and contamination was a major issue. They had a realistic but somewhat defeatist solution. Just burn it all. Use it for heat and power, treat plastic as an intermediate step of oil and nothing more. Then figure out emissions capture technology so that it can be stored somehow. I don't agree with it entirely but I did like that it was an realistic approach to a complex problem.

pfdietz 4y ago
It's a form of energy storage, helpful for seasonal load leveling, or perhaps production of synfuels.