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But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US. One of the barriers of effectively recycling P

by audunw 3y ago

But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US. One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful. The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material. The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in. Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.

RandallBrown 3y ago
Bottle and can recycling machines are common in the United States as well, although only in places with bottle/can deposits. Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.
- lobochrome 3y ago
  The first principle hack here is to put the waste stream separation burden on the consumer. Here in Japan we are sorting and packaging our trash all at home and putting it out to be collected individually. There is - cardboard (to be cut flat and bundled with string) - unlaminated and clean paper (to be bundled with string or collected in a paper bag) - PET (clean, no bottle cap, label removed) - Milk cartons above 1l (cut open, flattened and tied up with string) - glass - cans - aluminum - other plastics (if clean) - other metals Of the top of my head ;) What’s left over is classified as Burnable or non-Burnable and collected separately. Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. I spend about an hour sorting trash each week. Given the opportunity cost, I really consider what to buy, order online etc.
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    > I spend about an hour sorting trash each week That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture. Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash. Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      >Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. >Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies. Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.
      - lobochrome 3y ago
        But one of the beautiful things of living here is to witness (positiv) societal change happening in crazy speed. It used to be that people smoked everywhere, 10 years ago certain districts started prohibiting smoking in the street and relegated smokers to certain corners, today this corners have been replaced by closed containers with air conditioning and filtration systems. It sometimes feels magical…
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        Putting that kind of pressure into cleaning up smoking is pretty cool. Putting so many hours into recycling... well it depends on how much that actually accomplishes. Because that is a huge amount of labor.
      - numpad0 3y ago
        We use translucent plastic bags for trash as well, not that tall bin with lids. So a bag full of sausage bags in the bottles day at the neighborhood collection point sticks out.
ArchOversight 3y ago
In my local jurisdiction (a part of the US) the recycling bin is only allowed to be filled with cardboard and metal cans. Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash. Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear) and they mentioned to me that because there is no demand for cardboard/metal recycling while they load it into two different trucks, they end up at the exact same dump. This was confirmed not too much later when I went with my contractor to the dump to get rid of a ton of construction material, where I saw two dump trucks right next to each other, one filled with trash and one with recyclables. So very little actually gets recycled in the United States. Most of it ends up in giant piles, buried...
- phil21 3y ago
  > Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. It's reusable, sure. Glass milk bottles you return to be washed and refilled are great. Glass recycling though makes little sense in many areas of the world. You are basically trucking sand around. Just far less efficiently. Glass takes about 40% less energy to melt than sand does, so you need to have a relatively efficient recycling supply chain to make up for that. I haven't looked into it for over a decade, but the RoEI on that was exceedingly negative for my locality when I did.
  - donatj 3y ago
    Yes, but https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-world-running-out-of-sand https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-wo...
    - 0xffff2 3y ago
      I only skimmed this particular article, but the problem it discusses isn't relevant to glass, in which the particle shape doesn't matter. Am I missing something that makes it relevant?
lamontcg 3y ago
> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material. Yep, its all our fault.
jwells89 3y ago
I would say a significant portion of the burden, perhaps the majority, lies on food companies for using so many different types of packaging. Sorting discarded packaging into N bins is exactly the kind of overhead in day-to-day life that a lot of people simply don’t have time for and causes friction that makes it less likely to be adopted by the people who do. Regulations that greatly limit the total number of packaging types may be of help here.
OtherShrezzing 3y ago
>The ideal solution is... The ideal solution is surely that the waste management industry figures out how to deal efficiently with two streams of waste, one perishable and the other not.
xyzzyz 3y ago
> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously. However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process. Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself). People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,
- treflop 3y ago
  I mean your analysis isn’t taking into account the high cost of reducing entropy. Picking damaged fruit from undamaged fruit or mixing a low-entropy fuel with a low-entropy additive to make a high entropy product is cheap. Sorting through trash is much more expensive because the entropy in a trash stream is massive, and it only gets worse downstream in the chain. You’ve got all sorts of different types of things mixed together, some possibly dangerous. And we already offload a lot of this sorting to third-world countries and this is not exactly an ethical solution.
- handsclean 3y ago
  If specialization were always better then we’d hire a different specialist to press each key on the keyboard. Specialization is only efficient when the specialist can do a better job, and by enough to outweigh overhead. Rough sorting is extremely basic and requires no “training”, so specialization is less efficient, and serves only to shift work to people whose time is valued less.

by audunw 3y ago

RandallBrown 3y ago

Bottle and can recycling machines are common in the United States as well, although only in places with bottle/can deposits. Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.

lobochrome 3y ago
The first principle hack here is to put the waste stream separation burden on the consumer. Here in Japan we are sorting and packaging our trash all at home and putting it out to be collected individually. There is - cardboard (to be cut flat and bundled with string) - unlaminated and clean paper (to be bundled with string or collected in a paper bag) - PET (clean, no bottle cap, label removed) - Milk cartons above 1l (cut open, flattened and tied up with string) - glass - cans - aluminum - other plastics (if clean) - other metals Of the top of my head ;) What’s left over is classified as Burnable or non-Burnable and collected separately. Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. I spend about an hour sorting trash each week. Given the opportunity cost, I really consider what to buy, order online etc.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > I spend about an hour sorting trash each week That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture. Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash. Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    >Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. >Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies. Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.
    - lobochrome 3y ago
      But one of the beautiful things of living here is to witness (positiv) societal change happening in crazy speed. It used to be that people smoked everywhere, 10 years ago certain districts started prohibiting smoking in the street and relegated smokers to certain corners, today this corners have been replaced by closed containers with air conditioning and filtration systems. It sometimes feels magical…
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        Putting that kind of pressure into cleaning up smoking is pretty cool. Putting so many hours into recycling... well it depends on how much that actually accomplishes. Because that is a huge amount of labor.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      We use translucent plastic bags for trash as well, not that tall bin with lids. So a bag full of sausage bags in the bottles day at the neighborhood collection point sticks out.

ArchOversight 3y ago

In my local jurisdiction (a part of the US) the recycling bin is only allowed to be filled with cardboard and metal cans. Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash. Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear) and they mentioned to me that because there is no demand for cardboard/metal recycling while they load it into two different trucks, they end up at the exact same dump. This was confirmed not too much later when I went with my contractor to the dump to get rid of a ton of construction material, where I saw two dump trucks right next to each other, one filled with trash and one with recyclables. So very little actually gets recycled in the United States. Most of it ends up in giant piles, buried...

phil21 3y ago
> Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. It's reusable, sure. Glass milk bottles you return to be washed and refilled are great. Glass recycling though makes little sense in many areas of the world. You are basically trucking sand around. Just far less efficiently. Glass takes about 40% less energy to melt than sand does, so you need to have a relatively efficient recycling supply chain to make up for that. I haven't looked into it for over a decade, but the RoEI on that was exceedingly negative for my locality when I did.
- donatj 3y ago
  Yes, but https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-world-running-out-of-sand https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-wo...
  - 0xffff2 3y ago
    I only skimmed this particular article, but the problem it discusses isn't relevant to glass, in which the particle shape doesn't matter. Am I missing something that makes it relevant?

lamontcg 3y ago

jwells89 3y ago

I would say a significant portion of the burden, perhaps the majority, lies on food companies for using so many different types of packaging. Sorting discarded packaging into N bins is exactly the kind of overhead in day-to-day life that a lot of people simply don’t have time for and causes friction that makes it less likely to be adopted by the people who do. Regulations that greatly limit the total number of packaging types may be of help here.

OtherShrezzing 3y ago

>The ideal solution is... The ideal solution is surely that the waste management industry figures out how to deal efficiently with two streams of waste, one perishable and the other not.

xyzzyz 3y ago

> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously. However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process. Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself). People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,

treflop 3y ago
I mean your analysis isn’t taking into account the high cost of reducing entropy. Picking damaged fruit from undamaged fruit or mixing a low-entropy fuel with a low-entropy additive to make a high entropy product is cheap. Sorting through trash is much more expensive because the entropy in a trash stream is massive, and it only gets worse downstream in the chain. You’ve got all sorts of different types of things mixed together, some possibly dangerous. And we already offload a lot of this sorting to third-world countries and this is not exactly an ethical solution.
handsclean 3y ago
If specialization were always better then we’d hire a different specialist to press each key on the keyboard. Specialization is only efficient when the specialist can do a better job, and by enough to outweigh overhead. Rough sorting is extremely basic and requires no “training”, so specialization is less efficient, and serves only to shift work to people whose time is valued less.