5 ms·

For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "d

by rob74 9mo ago

For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...

adrianN 9mo ago
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
- stmL 9mo ago
  Can you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
  - mngnt 9mo ago
    This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
    - pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
      Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...
      - DaSHacka 9mo ago
        A completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can only assume was said in jest.
        Dylan16807 9mo ago
        It sounds like a description of most of a deposit system to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging recycling.
        tstrimple 9mo ago
        See "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.
        GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
        Hey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.
        DaSHacka 9mo ago
        The company, sure, but selecting a fall guy to deal with arbitrary expenses will not help get anything done for the environment.
        pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
        Yes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.
    - sofixa 9mo ago
      wildly country dependent, e.g. check the stats for the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251022-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
- rjh29 9mo ago
  Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
  - vasco 9mo ago
    It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
    - nandomrumber 9mo ago
      > because it gets burned I wouldn’t really call that recycling.
      - johannes1234321 9mo ago
        As long as the heat is used for something (electricity, building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage dump and forgetting about it. But yes, not proper recycling.
    - eru 9mo ago
      Well, it depends a lot on material. Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because it actually makes financial sense. Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them for electricity.
    - chpatrick 9mo ago
      In Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable.
      - mikkupikku 9mo ago
- setopt 9mo ago
  Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).
csomar 9mo ago
> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.
- kotaKat 9mo ago
  I concur on this one. Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling. Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
eru 9mo ago
Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch? (The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics. Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails. Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
- pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
  Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view? The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare. Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
  - eru 9mo ago
    We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.
    - slow_typist 9mo ago
      Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere. Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain. Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.
      - eru 9mo ago
        > Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly. My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new oil and gas. If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think more seriously about recycling plastic.
amelius 9mo ago
Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.
pixl97 9mo ago
>they could use a non-rechargeable battery The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would drain charge first. But that brings in the second issue of the device not being refillable, which may be the bigger sin.

by rob74 9mo ago

adrianN 9mo ago

To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).

stmL 9mo ago
Can you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
- mngnt 9mo ago
  This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
  - pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
    Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...
    - DaSHacka 9mo ago
      A completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can only assume was said in jest.
      - Dylan16807 9mo ago
        It sounds like a description of most of a deposit system to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging recycling.
        tstrimple 9mo ago
        See "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.
      - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
        Hey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.
        DaSHacka 9mo ago
        The company, sure, but selecting a fall guy to deal with arbitrary expenses will not help get anything done for the environment.
      - pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
        Yes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.
  - sofixa 9mo ago
    wildly country dependent, e.g. check the stats for the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251022-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
rjh29 9mo ago
Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
- vasco 9mo ago
  It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
  - nandomrumber 9mo ago
    > because it gets burned I wouldn’t really call that recycling.
    - johannes1234321 9mo ago
      As long as the heat is used for something (electricity, building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage dump and forgetting about it. But yes, not proper recycling.
  - eru 9mo ago
    Well, it depends a lot on material. Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because it actually makes financial sense. Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them for electricity.
  - chpatrick 9mo ago
    In Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable.
    - mikkupikku 9mo ago
setopt 9mo ago
Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).

csomar 9mo ago

> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.

kotaKat 9mo ago
I concur on this one. Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.
TeMPOraL 9mo ago
And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling. Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.

eru 9mo ago

Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch? (The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics. Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails. Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)

pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view? The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare. Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
- eru 9mo ago
  We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.
  - slow_typist 9mo ago
    Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere. Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain. Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.
    - eru 9mo ago
      > Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly. My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new oil and gas. If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think more seriously about recycling plastic.

amelius 9mo ago

Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.

pixl97 9mo ago

>they could use a non-rechargeable battery The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would drain charge first. But that brings in the second issue of the device not being refillable, which may be the bigger sin.