7 ms·

In some cities garbage workers are intstructed to take a look at a recycling bin beforehand. If they see a single plastic bag they dump the whole thing with the

by culi 4y ago

In some cities garbage workers are intstructed to take a look at a recycling bin beforehand. If they see a single plastic bag they dump the whole thing with the landfill pile. Same for "compostable plastic bags". Bags break really expensive machinery regularly and are probably one of the single worst things you could throw away There are so many gaps like these in the public's understanding of how recycling works (and doesn't!) and the reality. Mixed plastics are useless; you need to wash your dirty plastics; the triangle doesn't mean it's recyclable it's there to tell you what type of plastic it is (usually only 1, PET, and 2, HDPE, are recyclable). These are the very basics of recycling that, from my experience, the majority of people don't understand. It would take literally 10 minutes to explain most of this to people We keep bending over backwards trying to innovate our way towards making recycling really behave like the magic green plastic/paper eating box people imagine it to be but I feel like we'd get so much more return on investment if we spent a fraction of our investments on simple public education. At least at this point where that latter investment is basically nil in most places

scrollaway 4y ago
Educating people to spend time solving themselves a problem over-and-over forever, versus expanding our knowledge of material science to solve that same problem for everyone, once and for all? I know which one's preferable.
- nmg 4y ago
  (Is it either/or?)
- culi 4y ago
  It's not one or the other. It's that we're spending millions into one category and zero in another. Zero waste is already technically achievable with the technologies we have today. Kamikatsu, Japan is an extreme example where they sort their waste into 34 different bins. We don't have to do all that but we would see extreme immediate benefits from even slightly abandoning George Bush's "the American lifestyle is non-negotiable" proclamation
  - bluGill 4y ago
    The sorting doesn't really work as odds are too strong that someone in the city made a mistake and so you have to resort everything anyway. Automatic sorting machines that don't make mistakes are a better bet in the long run. Don't forget to account for the costs of 34 separate dumping operations, generally with 34 different trucks, which is itself and environmental disaster.
hgsgm 4y ago
This is because recycling is a fraud whose primary goal is to make people overcome their opposition to consuming wasteful plastics.
- tmountain 4y ago
  This—it’s a tactic to alleviate guilt from the consumer for buying single use plastics. The best education is to let people know that the vast majority of plastic will not be recycled.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    My motivation to recycle and sort took a big dip when I found out that where I previously lived the plastics bin gets carted off to incineration, all of it, no recycling in place because apparently that wasn't economically viable.
- userbinator 4y ago
  That should really be said of "biodegradable" or any -degradable. Plastics are pretty much an optimum in terms of energy required to produce vs. durability, so deliberately decreasing the latter is the real waste and the result of an agenda of planned obsolescence.
- carabiner 4y ago
  Plastic recycling certainly is. Not sure about other materials. Plastic recycling is a scam from the petrochemical industry though and doesn't work.
saberworks 4y ago
I understand the sentiment but it's not a solution. The only solution is to prohibit plastic packaging or force companies to use types of plastic that are easy to recycle. I believe it's easier to regulate the company producing the waste than try to get the entire population to agree on and behave in a certain way.
- sgillen 4y ago
  True but there would also be more public pressure to regulate if people knew just how little of their recycling actually gets recycled.
- jaggederest 4y ago
  https://epr.sustainablepackaging.org/ https://epr.sustainablepackaging.org/ As is standard, perhaps, the concept and ideas are already well-established, the only requirement is to enact them. I also suspect that many of the initiatives are pretty weak, watered down by packaging producers who don't want to bear the full cost of waste management.
- sfpotter 4y ago
  Why should we not try to get the population to behave a certain way? The alternative is a society full of people who behave antisocially, acting as if only their needs matter. It’s hard to say whether a concerted effort to make people more invested in the civic good will be effective, but throwing our hands in the air will undoubtedly have the intended effect.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    I feel that this has things inverted. People generally don’t care about the packaging or even the materials in the product. Those choices are made almost entirely by the seller. Why should the buyer be responsible for cleaning up the seller’s mess? If it’s possible to economically create products that don’t produce waste then this should be mandated, because otherwise there will always be some asshole corporation who is willing to undercut competitors on price by externalising costs to the environment.
teeray 4y ago
You have to assume that any adherence to a recycling regime will have a spectrum of success never reaching 100%. Someone will fill their bin with all kinds of non-recyclable plastic. They won’t always clean them out. Education can improve this situation but it can’t eliminate it. We have to assume failure at some level and design for it instead of chasing the unattainable 100% compliance.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  In the office I work with smart tech people, I see mistakes all the time. You basically have to read the entire recycling guide to get it right. So yes, it has to be built for 90% compliance.
- czynskee 4y ago
  In Switzerland they have a “simple” solution to this problem. The onus is on the consumer to make sure all recyclables are washed and split appropriately. There are different bins for metals, paper, compost, and the different kinds of plastic. The municipality randomly checks your bags and fines you if you don’t do this right. Regular trash has to go in specific bags that are much more expensive. Basically the incentives are setup such that everyone takes the 10 extra minutes to do it right. People are annoyed but once you have a system down it’s not really hard to do. I think this is the way to go. Everyone pitches in to make recycling work. In the long run it may even incentivize sellers to make their products easy to recycle, as buyers are forced to care. Note I may have some details wrong as this is based on what I remember from living there 10 years ago.
  - beerpls 4y ago
    “ Everyone pitches in to make recycling work. In the long run it may even incentivize sellers to make their products easy to recycle, as buyers are forced to care.” I just bought about 15 pounds of plastic in the form of bottles and material and whatnot from the store. Then at the front they refused to give me plastics bags weighing a few grams. There’s no way in hell any reasonable person should be on board with these kinds of taxes or policies. All they will end up doing is making people pay money to the rich, while the rich don’t do anything but continue to use more plastic for their purposes You want change, charge the company for plastic straight away. Stop expecting consumers to bear the burden of corporate greed
userbinator 4y ago
but I feel like we'd get so much more return on investment if we spent a fraction of our investments on simple public education. For a great example of this, look at Japan. Bags break really expensive machinery regularly and are probably one of the single worst things you could throw away I've seen dedicated bins just for recycling bags, but as you mentioned, the problem is in educating people to sort plastics correctly. Of course, reuse comes before recycle, and lots of things that are supposedly "single use" can really be reused instead of buying something else, but many people don't even bother to think.
- rjsw 4y ago
  In the UK, supermarkets have bins for recycling plastic bags. Not just shopping bags, plenty of plastic packaging is labelled "recycle at supermarket".
s17n 4y ago
Empirically, most people weren’t willing to do this stuff (the kind of education you’re talking about was common in early recycling programs) and recycling only became widespread with the advent of single stream. Maybe advocates just need to try harder, though.
- culi 4y ago
  > Empirically, most people weren’t willing to do this stuff People had to be taught to throw things away. Seriously, just look at vintage 1950s advertisements introducing the concept of "disposables."[0] This was commercial and government interests aligned on what to do about all the production capacity and factories from the war economy now that the war had ended. The conclusion was a total transformation of our society centered around consumption I think it's important to bring some historical context and remember that what needs to happen here isn't so much "learning" as it is "unlearning" [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb1768e4b01e9bd3540ffa https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb176...
  - bavent 4y ago
    I remember a scene in the show "Mad Men" where they just flick out their blanket to scatter all trash from a picnic and then leave. I thought it had to be satire but I asked an older coworker and he said it was pretty accurate to how things were when he was a kid.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Ironically, plastic bags were invented to be reusable.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    The term "disposable" might be a post-war thing (The Google Ngram views for "disposable" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposable&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposable&yea... and "disposables" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposables&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposables&ye... are pretty neat.) However, the concept is older. One-use paper Dixie Cups started around 1910, replacing the shared cup. "How unsanitary!" you might think of the old system. Sure, but the Dixie Cup Company sure did promote that hard. "Just think of the luxury—a new cup filled with pure water all for a cent" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.73 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.73
Choco31415 4y ago
One of the things I’ve seen at universities a lot are signs on the recycling and garbage bins saying what is allowed and not. Maybe recycling bins could have more of that to help people know what’s okay or not. Do you think it’d help if the plastic type label was color coded too? Say yellow for PET, red for HDPE, etc, to help people recycle only the right plastics. Generally I’ve seen that it’s not that people don’t understand recycling, it’s that it takes energy and effort to figure out what to do and it’s not always easy.
- ploxiln 4y ago
  I live in a nice condo building. Every floor has a recycling room, with a sign above the two bins that says "no bags, put recyclables directly in bins". I still see a lot of bags. I think there just needs to be someone supervising saying "For real, seriously, no bags." I think people just don't know if it's a real rule, or an over-simplified kinda fake rule, like wear a helmet. In fact, I don't know, I just have a weird engineer mind that wants things to work right, whatever they are. Actually I think we need people to be told, in school and at recycling points: "you don't have to pretend to be green, just throw it away if you don't care". It seems to me that recycling is one of the least controversial things, everyone knows it's good and wants to support it, just not many people evidently care that it's done in a way that actually works. Again, as an engineer, this bothers me.
yourapostasy 4y ago
The Precious Plastic project shows how to recycle plastic grocery bags into a polyethylene feedstock to manufacture new objects with [1]. You can also turn grocery bags into 3D printer filament. The technology is within reach of intentional communities to maintain, so they turn what is usually a waste stream into an asset. [1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/how-to/create-marble-from-plastic-bags https://community.preciousplastic.com/how-to/create-marble-f...
mngnt 4y ago
>> wash your dirty plastics I've thought about this a lot. Is it worth wasting water, derergent and energy to clean a yogurt cup, for instance? Does the plastic-waste-recycled outweigh the water-wasted? I never found an answer, maybe this is a really tough comparison? Too apple vs. orange? (Edited for spelling)
- hn_user2 4y ago
  Especially if my clean plastics will get mixed in with a bunch of dirty plastics and then rewashed in with that batch. I don’t know the answer either but would love to find out so I can be a better citizen about it.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  The CO2 impact of potable residential water in most places is minimal, about 0.22g/liter [1]. [1] https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/articles/dhs/the-carbon-footprint-of-potable-water/ https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/articles/dhs/the-ca...
  - j-bos 4y ago
    If CO2 is the concern, wouldn't sending that plastic (carbon) to a landfill (sequestering) be even better?
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      No, basically all Lifetime Cost Analysis of plastic recycling suggest it saves carbon/GHG to recycle. (And further that incinerating it with energy recovery is more GHG friendly than landfill) The people who believe otherwise seem to get their information from fossil fuel funded "libertarian" sources, that seem to magically always conclude that selling more fossil fuels is the best possible answer to every question.
- kurthr 4y ago
  Your yogurt cup is almost always PP (Polyproylene) Type 5 to maintain stiffness at large size. In that case the answer is throw it in the garbage, they're going to burn it or send it to China/Africa anyway. The one that blows my mind is washing aluminum cans (or steel). How do you think they're going to get the plastic coating off the cans and remelt it? I mean don't recycle a full can, but they have washers for recycled materials too.
xyzal 4y ago
Recently, I was at a local shopping center, and there were trash bins with the usual three color marked holes for recycling ... but under them, if you peeked close enough, you saw there was one collecting bag where everything went. Made me sad.
snassar 4y ago
I don't know how it is in other countries. We recently wondered what the right thing to do is and the Citystate of Berlin has an FAQ on recycling: https://www.bsr.de/die-top-13-mullmythen-26874.php https://www.bsr.de/die-top-13-mullmythen-26874.php which makes some things explicit: (It is in German, but deepl translated the relevant section) Do empty bottles and packaging have to be washed out? No. Because the packaging is rinsed out in the recycling process, when the sorted plastics are shredded. It is only important that all packaging is emptied of residues [ed. The translation misses tmthat they mean large residue or levtover amounts], is not stacked and the lid is removed.
entropyie 4y ago
This is the wrong attitude. This is victim blaming. Expecting ordinary people to understand the bewildering array of plastic types, biofilms and composite materials is not realistic. Add to that deceptive packaging (like the infamous green triangle that doesn't mean it's recyclable at all). The solution is to tackle it at the source of all this waste. Tax the shit out of supermarkets and shops that sell non recyclable packaging.
- samirillian 4y ago
  I think you're posing a false dichotomy here. I, as a person who is still fuzzy on how to recycle, did not feel blamed. I agree with the general sentiment; nobody knows the rules! We should've had a whole class on shit like this in high school. Obviously, there are larger problems caused by unfettered capitalism at work, but increasing recycling and composting infrastructure, hand-in-hand with public education on how to use that infrastructure, would make things better, and probably add some intangible benefits, like feeling some degree of agency over the process, which would have positive externalities like making people feel like they might have some greater agency over the bigger, structural problems, which might lead to greater political/economic change.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Natsu 4y ago
> In some cities garbage workers are intstructed to take a look at a recycling bin beforehand. If they see a single plastic bag they dump the whole thing with the landfill pile. I once saw someone throw a couch away in the recycling bin...
rjsw 4y ago
Seems sensible, wish they did that here so I didn't have to keep moving dirty bags between bins. I recycle correctly but one apartment in the block is being used as an AirBnB, every week there is random waste in every recycling bin.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
in Britain we have 100 different municipalities and all of them differ in their recycling policies and capability
TonyTrapp 4y ago
> you need to wash your dirty plastics Funny, I heard the exact opposite in a documentary about one of these recycling facilities, from the people running the facility. They should probably know. Though it may also very much depend on the facility itself.
cultureswitch 4y ago
As someone who actually knows this stuff, effectively sorting my trash is way too much effort for effectively very little return as I also know chances are even if I do it right my stuff will be burned anyway. It is completely unrealistic to expect the average trashbin user (as in literally everyone even if you can't read) to follow recycling instructions for plastic (paper tends to be simpler). It's much too complicated and a majority of the packaging you'll find in supermarkets involves way too much effort separating the materials.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  Why is it unrealistic? Is it reasonable to expect every important problem or social responsibility to be easy or unobtrusive? Sometimes you may both need to do something and it's inconvenient...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
quickthrowman 4y ago
It’s all theater and not worth doing, we should recycle metal, glass, and paper and burn/bury the plastic. We might as well be honest with ourselves about where our waste goes instead of pretending we recycle it.

by culi 4y ago

scrollaway 4y ago

Educating people to spend time solving themselves a problem over-and-over forever, versus expanding our knowledge of material science to solve that same problem for everyone, once and for all? I know which one's preferable.

nmg 4y ago
(Is it either/or?)
culi 4y ago
It's not one or the other. It's that we're spending millions into one category and zero in another. Zero waste is already technically achievable with the technologies we have today. Kamikatsu, Japan is an extreme example where they sort their waste into 34 different bins. We don't have to do all that but we would see extreme immediate benefits from even slightly abandoning George Bush's "the American lifestyle is non-negotiable" proclamation
- bluGill 4y ago
  The sorting doesn't really work as odds are too strong that someone in the city made a mistake and so you have to resort everything anyway. Automatic sorting machines that don't make mistakes are a better bet in the long run. Don't forget to account for the costs of 34 separate dumping operations, generally with 34 different trucks, which is itself and environmental disaster.

hgsgm 4y ago

This is because recycling is a fraud whose primary goal is to make people overcome their opposition to consuming wasteful plastics.

tmountain 4y ago
This—it’s a tactic to alleviate guilt from the consumer for buying single use plastics. The best education is to let people know that the vast majority of plastic will not be recycled.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  My motivation to recycle and sort took a big dip when I found out that where I previously lived the plastics bin gets carted off to incineration, all of it, no recycling in place because apparently that wasn't economically viable.
userbinator 4y ago
That should really be said of "biodegradable" or any -degradable. Plastics are pretty much an optimum in terms of energy required to produce vs. durability, so deliberately decreasing the latter is the real waste and the result of an agenda of planned obsolescence.
carabiner 4y ago
Plastic recycling certainly is. Not sure about other materials. Plastic recycling is a scam from the petrochemical industry though and doesn't work.

saberworks 4y ago

I understand the sentiment but it's not a solution. The only solution is to prohibit plastic packaging or force companies to use types of plastic that are easy to recycle. I believe it's easier to regulate the company producing the waste than try to get the entire population to agree on and behave in a certain way.

sgillen 4y ago
True but there would also be more public pressure to regulate if people knew just how little of their recycling actually gets recycled.
jaggederest 4y ago
https://epr.sustainablepackaging.org/ https://epr.sustainablepackaging.org/ As is standard, perhaps, the concept and ideas are already well-established, the only requirement is to enact them. I also suspect that many of the initiatives are pretty weak, watered down by packaging producers who don't want to bear the full cost of waste management.
sfpotter 4y ago
Why should we not try to get the population to behave a certain way? The alternative is a society full of people who behave antisocially, acting as if only their needs matter. It’s hard to say whether a concerted effort to make people more invested in the civic good will be effective, but throwing our hands in the air will undoubtedly have the intended effect.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I feel that this has things inverted. People generally don’t care about the packaging or even the materials in the product. Those choices are made almost entirely by the seller. Why should the buyer be responsible for cleaning up the seller’s mess? If it’s possible to economically create products that don’t produce waste then this should be mandated, because otherwise there will always be some asshole corporation who is willing to undercut competitors on price by externalising costs to the environment.

teeray 4y ago

You have to assume that any adherence to a recycling regime will have a spectrum of success never reaching 100%. Someone will fill their bin with all kinds of non-recyclable plastic. They won’t always clean them out. Education can improve this situation but it can’t eliminate it. We have to assume failure at some level and design for it instead of chasing the unattainable 100% compliance.

dehrmann 4y ago
In the office I work with smart tech people, I see mistakes all the time. You basically have to read the entire recycling guide to get it right. So yes, it has to be built for 90% compliance.
czynskee 4y ago
In Switzerland they have a “simple” solution to this problem. The onus is on the consumer to make sure all recyclables are washed and split appropriately. There are different bins for metals, paper, compost, and the different kinds of plastic. The municipality randomly checks your bags and fines you if you don’t do this right. Regular trash has to go in specific bags that are much more expensive. Basically the incentives are setup such that everyone takes the 10 extra minutes to do it right. People are annoyed but once you have a system down it’s not really hard to do. I think this is the way to go. Everyone pitches in to make recycling work. In the long run it may even incentivize sellers to make their products easy to recycle, as buyers are forced to care. Note I may have some details wrong as this is based on what I remember from living there 10 years ago.
- beerpls 4y ago
  “ Everyone pitches in to make recycling work. In the long run it may even incentivize sellers to make their products easy to recycle, as buyers are forced to care.” I just bought about 15 pounds of plastic in the form of bottles and material and whatnot from the store. Then at the front they refused to give me plastics bags weighing a few grams. There’s no way in hell any reasonable person should be on board with these kinds of taxes or policies. All they will end up doing is making people pay money to the rich, while the rich don’t do anything but continue to use more plastic for their purposes You want change, charge the company for plastic straight away. Stop expecting consumers to bear the burden of corporate greed

userbinator 4y ago

but I feel like we'd get so much more return on investment if we spent a fraction of our investments on simple public education. For a great example of this, look at Japan. Bags break really expensive machinery regularly and are probably one of the single worst things you could throw away I've seen dedicated bins just for recycling bags, but as you mentioned, the problem is in educating people to sort plastics correctly. Of course, reuse comes before recycle, and lots of things that are supposedly "single use" can really be reused instead of buying something else, but many people don't even bother to think.

rjsw 4y ago
In the UK, supermarkets have bins for recycling plastic bags. Not just shopping bags, plenty of plastic packaging is labelled "recycle at supermarket".

s17n 4y ago

Empirically, most people weren’t willing to do this stuff (the kind of education you’re talking about was common in early recycling programs) and recycling only became widespread with the advent of single stream. Maybe advocates just need to try harder, though.

culi 4y ago
> Empirically, most people weren’t willing to do this stuff People had to be taught to throw things away. Seriously, just look at vintage 1950s advertisements introducing the concept of "disposables."[0] This was commercial and government interests aligned on what to do about all the production capacity and factories from the war economy now that the war had ended. The conclusion was a total transformation of our society centered around consumption I think it's important to bring some historical context and remember that what needs to happen here isn't so much "learning" as it is "unlearning" [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb1768e4b01e9bd3540ffa https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb176...
- bavent 4y ago
  I remember a scene in the show "Mad Men" where they just flick out their blanket to scatter all trash from a picnic and then leave. I thought it had to be satire but I asked an older coworker and he said it was pretty accurate to how things were when he was a kid.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Ironically, plastic bags were invented to be reusable.
- eesmith 4y ago
  The term "disposable" might be a post-war thing (The Google Ngram views for "disposable" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposable&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposable&yea... and "disposables" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposables&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disposables&ye... are pretty neat.) However, the concept is older. One-use paper Dixie Cups started around 1910, replacing the shared cup. "How unsanitary!" you might think of the old system. Sure, but the Dixie Cup Company sure did promote that hard. "Just think of the luxury—a new cup filled with pure water all for a cent" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.73 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.73

Choco31415 4y ago

One of the things I’ve seen at universities a lot are signs on the recycling and garbage bins saying what is allowed and not. Maybe recycling bins could have more of that to help people know what’s okay or not. Do you think it’d help if the plastic type label was color coded too? Say yellow for PET, red for HDPE, etc, to help people recycle only the right plastics. Generally I’ve seen that it’s not that people don’t understand recycling, it’s that it takes energy and effort to figure out what to do and it’s not always easy.

ploxiln 4y ago
I live in a nice condo building. Every floor has a recycling room, with a sign above the two bins that says "no bags, put recyclables directly in bins". I still see a lot of bags. I think there just needs to be someone supervising saying "For real, seriously, no bags." I think people just don't know if it's a real rule, or an over-simplified kinda fake rule, like wear a helmet. In fact, I don't know, I just have a weird engineer mind that wants things to work right, whatever they are. Actually I think we need people to be told, in school and at recycling points: "you don't have to pretend to be green, just throw it away if you don't care". It seems to me that recycling is one of the least controversial things, everyone knows it's good and wants to support it, just not many people evidently care that it's done in a way that actually works. Again, as an engineer, this bothers me.

yourapostasy 4y ago

The Precious Plastic project shows how to recycle plastic grocery bags into a polyethylene feedstock to manufacture new objects with [1]. You can also turn grocery bags into 3D printer filament. The technology is within reach of intentional communities to maintain, so they turn what is usually a waste stream into an asset. [1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/how-to/create-marble-from-plastic-bags https://community.preciousplastic.com/how-to/create-marble-f...

mngnt 4y ago

>> wash your dirty plastics I've thought about this a lot. Is it worth wasting water, derergent and energy to clean a yogurt cup, for instance? Does the plastic-waste-recycled outweigh the water-wasted? I never found an answer, maybe this is a really tough comparison? Too apple vs. orange? (Edited for spelling)

hn_user2 4y ago
Especially if my clean plastics will get mixed in with a bunch of dirty plastics and then rewashed in with that batch. I don’t know the answer either but would love to find out so I can be a better citizen about it.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
The CO2 impact of potable residential water in most places is minimal, about 0.22g/liter [1]. [1] https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/articles/dhs/the-carbon-footprint-of-potable-water/ https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/articles/dhs/the-ca...
- j-bos 4y ago
  If CO2 is the concern, wouldn't sending that plastic (carbon) to a landfill (sequestering) be even better?
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    No, basically all Lifetime Cost Analysis of plastic recycling suggest it saves carbon/GHG to recycle. (And further that incinerating it with energy recovery is more GHG friendly than landfill) The people who believe otherwise seem to get their information from fossil fuel funded "libertarian" sources, that seem to magically always conclude that selling more fossil fuels is the best possible answer to every question.
kurthr 4y ago
Your yogurt cup is almost always PP (Polyproylene) Type 5 to maintain stiffness at large size. In that case the answer is throw it in the garbage, they're going to burn it or send it to China/Africa anyway. The one that blows my mind is washing aluminum cans (or steel). How do you think they're going to get the plastic coating off the cans and remelt it? I mean don't recycle a full can, but they have washers for recycled materials too.

xyzal 4y ago

Recently, I was at a local shopping center, and there were trash bins with the usual three color marked holes for recycling ... but under them, if you peeked close enough, you saw there was one collecting bag where everything went. Made me sad.

snassar 4y ago

I don't know how it is in other countries. We recently wondered what the right thing to do is and the Citystate of Berlin has an FAQ on recycling: https://www.bsr.de/die-top-13-mullmythen-26874.php https://www.bsr.de/die-top-13-mullmythen-26874.php which makes some things explicit: (It is in German, but deepl translated the relevant section) Do empty bottles and packaging have to be washed out? No. Because the packaging is rinsed out in the recycling process, when the sorted plastics are shredded. It is only important that all packaging is emptied of residues [ed. The translation misses tmthat they mean large residue or levtover amounts], is not stacked and the lid is removed.

entropyie 4y ago

This is the wrong attitude. This is victim blaming. Expecting ordinary people to understand the bewildering array of plastic types, biofilms and composite materials is not realistic. Add to that deceptive packaging (like the infamous green triangle that doesn't mean it's recyclable at all). The solution is to tackle it at the source of all this waste. Tax the shit out of supermarkets and shops that sell non recyclable packaging.

samirillian 4y ago
I think you're posing a false dichotomy here. I, as a person who is still fuzzy on how to recycle, did not feel blamed. I agree with the general sentiment; nobody knows the rules! We should've had a whole class on shit like this in high school. Obviously, there are larger problems caused by unfettered capitalism at work, but increasing recycling and composting infrastructure, hand-in-hand with public education on how to use that infrastructure, would make things better, and probably add some intangible benefits, like feeling some degree of agency over the process, which would have positive externalities like making people feel like they might have some greater agency over the bigger, structural problems, which might lead to greater political/economic change.
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Natsu 4y ago

> In some cities garbage workers are intstructed to take a look at a recycling bin beforehand. If they see a single plastic bag they dump the whole thing with the landfill pile. I once saw someone throw a couch away in the recycling bin...

rjsw 4y ago

Seems sensible, wish they did that here so I didn't have to keep moving dirty bags between bins. I recycle correctly but one apartment in the block is being used as an AirBnB, every week there is random waste in every recycling bin.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

in Britain we have 100 different municipalities and all of them differ in their recycling policies and capability

TonyTrapp 4y ago

> you need to wash your dirty plastics Funny, I heard the exact opposite in a documentary about one of these recycling facilities, from the people running the facility. They should probably know. Though it may also very much depend on the facility itself.

cultureswitch 4y ago

As someone who actually knows this stuff, effectively sorting my trash is way too much effort for effectively very little return as I also know chances are even if I do it right my stuff will be burned anyway. It is completely unrealistic to expect the average trashbin user (as in literally everyone even if you can't read) to follow recycling instructions for plastic (paper tends to be simpler). It's much too complicated and a majority of the packaging you'll find in supermarkets involves way too much effort separating the materials.

spicyusername 4y ago
Why is it unrealistic? Is it reasonable to expect every important problem or social responsibility to be easy or unobtrusive? Sometimes you may both need to do something and it's inconvenient...
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quickthrowman 4y ago

It’s all theater and not worth doing, we should recycle metal, glass, and paper and burn/bury the plastic. We might as well be honest with ourselves about where our waste goes instead of pretending we recycle it.