[HN Gopher] People over-emphasize the recycling aspect of "reduc...
___________________________________________________________________
People over-emphasize the recycling aspect of "reduce, reuse,
recycle"
Author : gsky
Score : 160 points
Date : 2023-07-26 05:38 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (futurism.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (futurism.com)
| rednerrus wrote:
| We could make a huge dent in this problem by simply reusing glass
| containers for things that are appropriate. Start with beer and
| soda. Move on to canned beans, soup, etc. Setup programs to make
| returning the containers easy.
|
| We use 80,000,000,000 aluminum cans, 35,000,000,000 plastic
| bottles, and 16,000,000,000 glass bottles a year in the US.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Indeed, the energy cost of machine-washing glass bottles is
| surely an order of magnitude less than that of recycling the
| broken glass into new bottles. However, I don't think you can
| replicate that with aluminium cans. They preserve their
| contents better than glass bottles do, so glass bottles can't
| necessarily replace them. The seal of aluminium cans also
| breaks when they're opened, so you can't directly wash and
| reuse the cans.
| callalex wrote:
| We could streamline this process and increase participation by
| having local governments provide a bin that they collect in a
| big truck every week...
| defrost wrote:
| The short form (6 paragraphs) futurism 'source' paraphrases the
| long form work of the primary researchers who discuss their own
| work first hand at:
|
| _Decades of public messages about recycling in the US have
| crowded out more sustainable ways to manage waste_
|
| https://theconversation.com/decades-of-public-messages-about...
| In our research on waste behavior, sustainability, engineering
| design and decision making, we examine what U.S. residents
| understand about the efficacy of different waste management
| strategies and which of those strategies they prefer.
| In two nationwide surveys in the U.S. that we conducted in
| October 2019 and March 2022, we found that people overlook waste
| reduction and reuse in favor of recycling. We call this tendency
| recycling bias and reduction neglect.
|
| (21 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36860103
|
| (6 minutes ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36873964
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Isn't this by policy design? Recycling is the only R that
| doesn't implicitly call for reduced consumption so it is the
| only one that is pushed. Reduce and reuse will curtail economy
| activity.
| ki_ wrote:
| horrible article, title is super clickbait and totally not what
| the article represents. There is no backfire and all it says is
| that some people dont know what can or cannot be recycled...
| cik wrote:
| It's important for each of us to do our part. It's even better
| when we help others do theirs. But, we really need to not lose
| sight of the fact that the (extreme) majority of pollution is
| industrial, and private outsized use.
|
| It's fun that X airline does carbon offsets. But, at the end of
| the day that private flight that someone took, his a
| significantly outsized impact.
| cal85 wrote:
| > It's important for each of us to do our part. It's even
| better when we help others do theirs.
|
| I challenge these assumptions. I suspect the "everyone must do
| their part" mentality is at best useless, and perhaps a major
| blocker, for devising effective techniques and systems to
| address the wide variety of issues that have been thrown
| together under the banner of "climate".
| 542354234235 wrote:
| 100% agree. The average consumer shouldn't have to the think
| about it at all. There are an insane number of potential
| problems in the world that need to be solved. Putting the
| cognitive load on individuals to each do a tiny bit on each
| individual problem is a stupidly ineffective and inefficient
| way to do almost anything. Much better to have either change
| made to how industries operate, or redesign how the system
| works so that whatever the desired outcome for individuals
| becomes the easiest and simplest option.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| DIY is one of the best ways to reduce conspicuous consumption and
| consumerism. Learn skills to make what you need rather than
| buying it. Learn to reuse materials as part of that process, and
| repair things back into working order.
|
| My favorite example of this is IKEA wood bed frames. I used to
| cruise around cities just picking up truckloads of perfectly good
| solid wood that people left on the street, and then would have
| endless supplies for building. I've built raised garden beds, new
| custom bed frames, awnings for porches, bird feeders and houses,
| tables, stools, shelves, and more, just from junk left on curbs.
|
| One time I found a pretty much fully functional sewing machine on
| the curb. That's when I learned how to sew, and have since
| repaired jeans, shirts, socks, and made little tote sacks as
| gifts out of old clothes.
|
| Once you learn a DIY skill it serves you for the rest of your
| life, saves you money, and helps the environment.
| pyrale wrote:
| Considering recycling is mostly promoted by consumer brands to
| avoid acting on their own end (for instance, by setting up
| deposit schemes to reuse parts), it's not very surprising that
| recycling is not really successful.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| we should be emphasizing "regulate"-ing plastics and industrial
| waste. Or "replacing" whole entire commercial pipelines.
| "regulate, replace, revolution".
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Corporations whose profit margins rely on continuation of current
| patterns of consumption say any deviation from this program is
| unwise.
| darkclouds wrote:
| I dont think there is a perfect solution, be it heavy machinery
| or human sorting at the waste depot, or human sorting at the
| home, but a KISS approach tends to help.
|
| Barcode backgrounds. Red for waste Green for recycle.
|
| Different background patterns to represent the different elements
| of packaging which can be recycled.
|
| Bottle with no outer wrapper.
|
| Two elements, top half of barcode background represents bottle
| top. Bottom half represents the bottle.
|
| ----------------
|
| | RED |
|
| ----------------
|
| | GREEN |
|
| ----------------
|
| Bottle with an outer wrapper.
|
| --------------------
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | | BOTTLE TOP | |
|
| | -------------- |
|
| | | BOTTLE | |
|
| | -------------- |
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| ---------------------
|
| Plastic trays
|
| ----------------------
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | | | |
|
| | | TRAY | |
|
| | | | |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | |
|
| ----------------------
|
| Tray with food sauces contain in plastic
|
| ----------------------
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | | TRAY | |
|
| | | ------- | |
|
| | | |SAUCE| | |
|
| | | ------- | |
|
| | | TRAY | |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | |
|
| ----------------------
|
| Glossy Magazines
|
| ----------------------
|
| | COVER |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | | | |
|
| | | INNARDS | |
|
| | | | |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | |
|
| ----------------------
|
| Bottle no plastic label plastic wrapped Multi packs
|
| ----------------------
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | | TOP | |
|
| | | ------- | |
|
| | | BOTTLE | |
|
| | ------------- |
|
| | |
|
| ----------------------
|
| Bottle with plastic label plastic wrapped Multi packs
|
| ---------------------------
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| | ----------------- |
|
| | | LABEL | |
|
| | | ---------| | |
|
| | | | TOP | | |
|
| | | ---------- | |
|
| | | | BOTTLE | | |
|
| | | ---------- | |
|
| | | LABEL | |
|
| | ----------------- |
|
| | WRAPPER |
|
| --------------------------
|
| Basically the principle of working from the out in and where
| there are joins like bottle tops they get split in half.
|
| Dont know if the Red and Green would affect barcodes and colour
| blind people much though.
|
| Or a phone app where every barcode scanned shows what can and
| cant be recycled on the product, maybe organised through a trade
| body of sorts.
|
| I think the barcode background is wasted though.
|
| Edit. The ascii art hasnt come out well on here but hopefully the
| gist can be understood.
| pimpampum wrote:
| Recycling was pushed forward by companies so they wouldn't have
| to cut down on plastic. It's like carbon credits for oil
| companies.
| dgan wrote:
| IMHO, asking end consumer to "correctly sort" the trash is a non-
| scalable, non-solution.
|
| First of all, packaging isn't even standardised: you need to
| assume all the information about materials used to be available
| to end consumer, and the consumer must follow the guidelines to
| separate them. If packaging were standardised (with a limited
| number of options, not like two hundreds different things) it
| would be much much simpler and more efficient. Plus, even in
| France (just example), sorting instructions vary from town to
| town, which makes everything even more complicated
|
| But even in the case above where everything is as simple and
| efficient as possible, and end consumers are 100% benevolent, why
| would you want to rely on N millions agents, each making some
| mistakes, when you could rely on a couple (of dozens) sorting
| plants, with professionals paid to do just that ?
|
| For me it's just blaming and punishing the weak (end consumer) ,
| because coward and mediocre politicians don't want to tackle the
| strong (industry)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Ironically, it was the trash handling companies that complained
| when the county introduced separating plastic from other
| general waste, because they had just invested in new machinery
| that could do it. And they have to keep that machinery and
| staff because not everyone will separate their waste properly.
|
| But even then, what's the point? The separated plastic is
| bundled up and... then what? Exported or sold to the highest
| bidder, who will do whatever with it. Some is recycled / reused
| performatively, but I'm sure a lot is just put in landfill or
| burned.
|
| See I don't even mind so much that plastic can't be reused as
| well yet, but it has to be stored responsibly. Landfill,
| concrete / impermiable basin, neatly stack the compressed
| plastic bales there, cover it up, and just forget about it
| until it can be "mined" again as a resource. Else, it'll just
| sit there and (naively of me, I know), be inert and harmless
| until it won't matter anymore.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Why would the companies complain if they still had to use
| their machinery? They didn't buy it in vain; the only
| difference is consumers waste a tiny bit more of their time.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| It really depends on the type of recycling you do. I recycle
| (after reducing and reusing) obsessively, while also being
| painfully aware of the problems with recycling. One of the things
| I recycle are soft plastics [1], which are made into fence posts
| (among other things) [2]. I recently bought 58 of these posts,
| and asked the company that makes them to do the maths on how much
| plastic was diverted. It surprised me - the 58 posts are the
| equivalent of "17,694 milk bottles and 79,098 bread bags". (These
| posts are warrantied for 10 years, and are expected to last for
| 50 years. I don't know what happens at the end of those 50
| years).
|
| 1. https://www.recycling.kiwi.nz
|
| 2. https://www.futurepost.co.nz
| peteradio wrote:
| > warrantied for 10 years,
|
| That's not great... I think by the end of the whole exercise
| you'll have wished to gone with proper posts.
| brewdad wrote:
| How long are wooden fence posts warrantied for? A year? Five?
| OP says they do have a 50 year expected lifespan.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| After 50 years, they will disintegrate and leach god knows what
| into the soi, of course.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Unless you pull them out and recycle them ;-)
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Ah but they probably start leaching and breaking down
| immediately. 50 years is just when they stop being able to
| do their function as a fence post.
|
| (Aside from that, the serendipity. Two bunnies, passing in
| the night)
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| They're specifically sold on the basis that they don't
| leach into the soil - that's why they're used in organic
| farms/orchards. (Although, after 50 years, who know what
| might happen).
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| It seems to me that with plastics we've been told they're
| safe and inert and yet have repeatedly been proven not to
| be (latest stuff about PFAS comes to mind.)
|
| I'm not sure I would trust plastics exposed to the
| elements for 50 years to not have _something_ occur to
| them. There's just way too much chemistry that can happen
| when you're in contact with water and sunlight for such
| long periods of time.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I'm sure they do - wear and tear to anything outdoors is
| inevitable (except maybe if your fence is titanium, in
| which case the wear and tear probably amounts to
| individual electrons!) but I would still very much prefer
| that those plastic bags be put to use rather than
| decompose - at broadly the same rate - uselessly in a
| landfill site.
| brutusborn wrote:
| This is interesting. After the recent collapse of a recycling
| company in Australia I was under the impression that soft
| plastic recycling wasn't economical. Are the posts particularly
| expensive? Or maybe are the definitions of 'soft plastic' in
| each case different?
|
| https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/redcycle-sof...
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I think it's the same type of soft plastic - I've seen both
| the RedCycle and NZ Soft Plastic recycling scheme logos on
| some products sold in both Australia and New Zealand. Reading
| between the lines of that report, it sounds more like
| 'mismanagement' was the problem rather than economics.
| bawolff wrote:
| I imagine there is a rather limited market for fence posts
| relative to the amount of soft plastic being recycled.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Depends on how many old wooden posts you have - in a
| country like New Zealand, there's a lot. Several years ago,
| they (the soft-plastic recycling company) did get too much
| plastic at one point, and had to pause collection for
| several months while they sorted out new suppliers, and
| found new uses for the product. I think they have now
| exceeded the original amount being collected, but they roll
| out new collection areas cautiously to ensure supply
| matches demand. It helps that we're progressively banning
| some types of soft plastic too (e.g. shopping bags are
| already gone).
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I think the posts came out about the same price as treated
| timber - maybe a little bit more. But they're easier to
| install (because they can often be rammed straight in where
| wooden posts would have to be dug in, and because you don't
| need to put concrete around the tip), last longer, and don't
| leach anything into the soil. The latter is particularly
| important for organic farms, where treated timber posts are a
| non-starter.
| peteradio wrote:
| Most treated lumber sold to consumers is copper based, I
| think that is generally accepted in the States for organic
| farming. Is it not where you are?
| billti wrote:
| We bought our outdoor furniture from this company in the U.S.
| (https://lolldesigns.com/pages/sustainability), which states
| on that page "All Loll outdoor furniture is made with
| recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE), one of the most
| commonly used plastics in the U.S. <snip> Loll's recycled
| material is sourced primarily from single-use milk jug
| containers".
|
| It wasn't cheap, but it looks great and has been very durable
| (had it about 5 years now out in the sun and still looks like
| new).
| blkhawk wrote:
| I don't like this type of down-cycling - while this is good
| because it double-uses a single use thing extending the use
| of the material to another cycle this is bad because it is
| sold as recycling to the consumer (on the milk bottle side
| at least). Those containers are probably easy to identify
| visually even at larger scales so its probably actually
| pick them out of the general plastic waste.
|
| The main issue with recycling plastic is that there are
| several plastics that just look the same until you check
| the embossed mark and number. This is not always easy to
| find / visible or even there at all. if you manage that you
| need to identify and remove the other plastics that make up
| the bottle.
|
| Many PET bottles have a shrink wrap label on them that uses
| a different plastic altogether. Generally it don't have a
| mark and can't be identified so it needs to go into the
| general garbage.
|
| same goes for the lid and related parts (bottles often have
| a ring that splits off when you open them) but
| realistically this does not have a mark showing the plastic
| type so you have to discard it into normal garbage.
|
| So basically plastic recycling while possible isn't really
| viable unless you reduce the allowed types of plastic and
| colors massively, school consumers a lot more and somehow
| create a cheap way to sort out the mistakes that happen.
|
| even then plastic is only good for a few cycles at best and
| after that down-cycling is the only thing you can do.
|
| glass, steel and aluminum do not have that issue.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Recycling is when a bottle gets made into another bottle, or a
| fence post into another fence post. Plastic can't be recycled.
| xnx wrote:
| Recycling is happily promoted and encouraged by corporations
| because it is the only one of the three that does not reduce
| consumption. To the corporation, reducing consumption is totally
| unacceptable.
| badrabbit wrote:
| At the grocery store today, I can get soft drinks in a glass
| bottle as well as in cans and plastic, I can get forzen food in
| paper based containers as well as plastic, I can get pringles in
| a cardboard tune bit lays stax is in plastic, I go out of my way
| to buy things in cans instead of plastic, delivery food arrived
| in cardboard containers sometimes but most of the time it comes
| in styroform inside plastic bags, I use a water filter instead of
| buying plasic bottles and I can buy metal forks, spoons and
| straws for at least around a dollar a piece which is not a big
| addition to any delivery order.
|
| Not too long ago, a world existed without plastic and styrofoam
| all over just fine.
|
| Electronics can be stored in glasses or metal enclosed cardboard
| (and it would look cooler!).
|
| I don't really care that much about recycling and I am doing all
| this now. I mostly refuse to recycle after finding out most
| places here just mix them up anyways and throw them in landfills.
|
| But my more important reasoning is that similar to "carbon
| footprint" this is a government problem not a consumer problem.
| Producers can use expensive products but if only a few do it in a
| few states then it is too costly for the producer and prices will
| increase. But if the government bans and regulates material usage
| then although material costs increase, so long as producers have
| a profit margin and competition the consumer will not see too
| much of a price increase. But even in competition and fighting
| price gouging governments are sucking big time.
|
| There is no reason every chip isn't in cardboard because pringles
| can turn a profit just fine and soda makers already have glass
| stored products for quite some time so they have no excuse.
|
| An argument I've heard is the other materials are hard to make at
| scale, but I already see them at scale. Even apple from what I
| hear has eliminated all but 4% plastic from their iPhones (not
| sure what the material is now).
|
| I am convinced that just like governments can solve climate
| change with nuclear power, water centric infra buildout and
| reducing cars (not replacing with evs), so can they solve waste
| that isn't degradable.
|
| I have said it before, the root cause in my opinion is the US
| needs constitutional reform and the rest of the world will catch
| on, even China will if their export economy depended on it.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Landfill is demonized.
|
| And yet for plastic waste it's the best destination.
|
| Our society is obsessed with "keeping plastic out of landfill".
| Why? Are we running out of landfill? No.
|
| We're so obsessed with keeping plastic out of landfill that we
| come up with ideas like putting waste plastic into roads. Sounds
| great doesn't it?
|
| Until you realize cars and trucks drive in those roads, grind
| them down. Grind out the plastic into microplastic as that go
| into air water soil food animals people.
|
| But hey, the important thing is the plastic was kept out of
| landfill, right?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Are we running out of landfill? No
|
| Varies by country.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| You should put it in roads.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Then the free market will solve that problem too: those who
| have excess land will take the stuff of our hands for a small
| fee. Put it into old coal mines as an example.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Landfill isn't demonised. It just happens to be the worst
| option for most stuff.
|
| Libertarians in the US have been landfill stans for decades
| because they are funded by the people who provide the inputs
| for non-recycled plastics, namely fossil fuels.
|
| The only thing they hate more than recycling is single use
| plastic bans, again because that means less fossil fuel sales.
|
| Ironically, their anti-recycling propaganda has been so
| successful that people have just started supporting outright
| bans. And now they have to embarrassingly suggest that bans are
| unnecessary because single use plastics can be recycled
| instead.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Landfill isn't demonised. It just happens to be the worst
| option for most stuff.
|
| This would be what to expand on. Without this, you have no
| foundation for the rest of your comment. I'll happily listen
| to why landfills are bad, I don't care about a bunch of
| motives and associations that rely on your audience already
| agreeing with you that landfills are bad to have any
| relevance.
|
| That's how propaganda works. It often leads by assuming the
| question, skips right past it into invective and speculation
| about the opponents' evil motives and associations; then when
| the audience asks about the question you skipped, it turns to
| speculation about the audience's evil motives and
| associations.
|
| _Landfill isn 't demonized, it's just bad! I'm not going to
| tell you why, though, I'm going to talk about the character
| of the people who disagree with me._
| Animats wrote:
| _" In a series of experiments, the UV researchers first asked
| participants first to list "reduce," "reuse," and "recycle" by
| order of efficacy -- the correct answer being the same one in the
| old slogan -- finding that a whopping 78 percent got it wrong. In
| a second experiment, the researchers had participants use a
| computer program to virtually "sort" waste into recycling,
| compost, and landfill bins. Unfortunately, the outcome of that
| survey was even more stark, with many incorrectly putting non-
| recyclable waste, such as plastic bags and lightbulbs, into the
| virtual recycle bin."_
|
| That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired". It just means
| that it's not occupying much consumer attention. Which it
| shouldn't. It's not about virtue signaling. It's about bulk
| materials handling.
|
| As I pointed out the last time this came up on HN, the machinery
| that sorts recyclables today does a far better job than humans.
| It's not even clear that it's even worth having people sort out
| trash from recyclables. Here's a plant that takes in ordinary
| trash and sorts it.[1] About 25% goes to the landfill, the rest
| is recycled. San Jose has two such plants. Total capacity over
| 200 tons per hour.
|
| This problem is routinely being solved by mostly boring but
| useful heavy machinery. The non-serious players talk about
| "green" and "eco" and want "awareness". The serious players in
| recycling talk about tons per hour.
|
| Modern recycling plans aren't that big. The one that does all of
| San Francisco is about the size of a Target store.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taUCHnAzlgw
| yread wrote:
| I thought the article would be more about how (warning
| speculation:) recycled plastic materials leech way more
| microplastics into the environment (compared to burning them),
| how people often use multiple products from recycled plastic
| (bags, clothes) because the recycled ones are worse and don't
| last as long or how we spend a lot of our CO2e budget on
| recycling plastics when we should be more worried about that.
|
| This is just an article about how dumb people are. Boring
| beebmam wrote:
| Some plastic bags are recyclable. It's usually specified on the
| plastic bag itself.
| brewdad wrote:
| I have seen bags labeled as being made from recycled plastic
| but I don't think I've ever seen one saying it is recyclable.
| They are not the same thing and my trash hauler at least
| specifically says to not recycle plastic bags.
| goalieca wrote:
| > That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired".
|
| I believe it strongly has. Compare the amount of non-recyclable
| single use plastic consumption these days vs the 1980s and
| you'll be shocked. Consumers got a strong messaging that they
| can consume this guilt-free and so all society shifted this
| direction.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Entirely this. Plastic recycling has done more to increase
| the use of plastic than anything else. By design, it turns
| out.
|
| Before plastic recycling came around, we were well on our way
| to eliminating most one-time use of plastics. Now, we use
| more than ever before in history.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _It 's not about virtue signaling. It's about bulk materials
| handling._
|
| people have been taught that recycling is virtuous, and that's
| how they have engaged with it, and they were being genuine.
|
| > _That doesn 't mean that recycling has "backfired"_
|
| people have devoted non-mythical man-months into processing,
| handling and even washing their trash, which trash has ended up
| in the same landfills they were going to before. Think how much
| free time the average person has in a day, this has been a
| tremendous waste of human potential. Using that much mindshare,
| children teaching time, and effort on nothing, only to cap it
| off with a rug-pull at the end, will turn out to be a backfire.
| _moof wrote:
| _> > It's not about virtue signaling. It's about bulk
| materials handling._
|
| _> people have been taught that recycling is virtuous, and
| that 's how they have engaged with it, and they were being
| genuine._
|
| That's not the same thing. Virtue signaling is when you do
| something in order to show other people that you are
| virtuous. If you would still recycle when no one's there to
| see it, then you're still doing something virtuous, but you
| aren't doing it to signal anything to others about yourself.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > trash has ended up in the same landfills they were going to
| before.
|
| People regularly raise this as a criticism of recycling.
|
| It's kind of like complaining about medicine if you go to see
| a homeopath or a snake oil salesman.
|
| Medicine has not "backfired", you just got tricked into doing
| something that was only pretending to be medicine. Aim your
| ire appropriately.
| tuatoru wrote:
| No, it's not. It's complaining about medicine that the
| National Institute of Health and other authority figures
| told you to take, that turned out to a waste of your time
| and mildly harmful.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| So which national agency told you to pretend to recycle?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > handling and even washing their trash
|
| Not to mention is yet another waste of water; my regional
| government actually asks for people not to wash their trash.
| smitty1e wrote:
| This; covid; global <whatever>; et cetera: the "experts" have
| debased their leadership capital to a substantial degree.
| rendaw wrote:
| I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the
| amount of required precision. They cover a few obvious things
| (food scraps, junk mail) and miss 99% of the stuff I actually
| have to throw out.
|
| At university there was an introductory talk about recycling,
| where they threatened that a single wrongly discarded piece of
| trash (uncleaned bottles or food containers IIRC) would prevent
| the whole batch from being recycled. The obvious conclusion
| being that if there's even a small amount of doubt about
| whether something can be recycled, it'd be better not to put it
| in the recycling bin (and risk the rest of the properly
| recyclable trash).
|
| I reached out for clarification on various policies - what
| about bonded plastic + paper, how clean, mixed plastics in
| bottle assemblies, unlabeled products, etc and they weren't
| able to answer.
|
| So I'm not at all surprised consumers aren't effectual.
|
| That said, while I want to believe machines are doing a much
| better, do you have any sources on the recycling statistics?
| San Jose claims to be an outlier at 74% recycling (diversion
| rate?) https://www.epa.gov/transforming-waste-tool/zero-waste-
| case-... - nationwide municipal solid waste looks like only
| about 1/3 recycled https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-
| materials-waste-... . If these machines haven't been rolled
| out, are they very new, or are there some barriers to using
| them?
| [deleted]
| oakesm9 wrote:
| > I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near
| the amount of required precision
|
| I've been pretty impressed by the A-Z list which my local
| council in the UK has. Covers 95% of the questions I've had
| on what to put where https://www.westsussex.gov.uk/l and-
| waste-and-housing/waste-and-recycling/recycling-and-waste-
| prevention-in-west-sussex/a-to-z-of-recycling/
| civilitty wrote:
| _> If these machines haven 't been rolled out, are they very
| new, or are there some barriers to using them?_
|
| Trash isn't very high up on the list of priorities for most
| municipalities and the upgrade cycle is on the order of
| decades.
| bmitc wrote:
| > I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near
| the amount of required precision.
|
| The main one I can think of is the plastic bubble mailers and
| also the air packaging bubbles Amazon uses. The city says not
| to put them in the blue recycle bin. The mailer itself says
| take it to a grocery store. I take it to Whole Foods, owned
| by Amazon, ask the Amazon return staff where to put it, and
| they refer me to the general recycle bin in the front. Then
| there's a web address on them that says the same thing as
| above.
|
| I don't know what to actually do with them or where a magic
| plastic mailer dropbox is at.
|
| No one uses plastic bags around here anymore, so I don't have
| to worry about them. When I did have them, I typically reused
| them until they basically became trash.
| throwoutway wrote:
| I take them to Kroger, there's usually a bin at the
| entrance by where they store the shopping carts. I noticed
| the other major chains tend to have these too, in more or
| less the entrance location
| bhandziuk wrote:
| I currently use grocery plastic bags as household garbage
| bags. I've not bought trash bags in a decade. It'll be
| slightly more pricy and less convenient if plastic bags go
| away. But maybe it's still good on the greater whole.
| mhalle wrote:
| Also note that the Amazon padded packaging says to remove
| paper labels before recycling, but it practically
| impossible to remove the Amazon paper labels (at least in
| my experience).
| toast0 wrote:
| > I reached out for clarification on various policies - what
| about bonded plastic + paper, how clean, mixed plastics in
| bottle assemblies, unlabeled products, etc and they weren't
| able to answer.
|
| If you want to get the real answers to these questions, you
| need to reach out to the organization that hauls your trash
| and recyclables. Bonus if they also operate the sorting, but
| either way, they should know.
|
| California has high targets for solid waste diversion, in
| genreral and for specific categories. [1] I don't know how
| many sanitary districts meet 2011 AB341's policy goal of 75%
| by 2020, but in light of that goal, I don't think San Jose is
| an outlier within California. With high goals, the trash
| haulers are doing extensive sorting, figuring out what items
| are common in the garbage stream and finding ways to recycle
| them.
|
| It is a function of priorities and volume though. Where I
| live now in WA, there isn't enough volume to justify a lot of
| effort in diversion, especially since there's no state
| mandate making it a priority. It's easy and not very
| expensive to send everything on a train to Oregon, so that's
| what happens.
|
| [1]
| https://calrecycle.ca.gov/StateAgency/Requirements/LawsRegs/
| Animats wrote:
| > Where I live now in WA, there isn't enough volume to
| justify a lot of effort in diversion
|
| Big cities generate enough volume in waste that an
| automated sorting plant is a win. There's some interest in
| mini recycling plants, but not all that much progress.
|
| Agricultural areas that put plastic film over fields as a
| sort of greenhouse generate square miles of plastic film
| waste. That's worth recycling, because they have to collect
| it anyway and what's collected is mostly uniform plastic
| film.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't live in a big city, but we're sort of
| close. It seems like it might make sense to ship to a
| nearby big city operation, but I guess once you're
| shipping, may as well go out of state.
| Google234 wrote:
| You pay enoug for trash in the Bay Area to pay a person to
| sort the trash by hand
| nwiswell wrote:
| > to pay a person
|
| Not in the Bay Area
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near
| the amount of required precision.
|
| This is the largest issue, imo. It's all extremely vague and
| confusing. Combine that with the message that getting it
| wrong means that potentially all of the recycling in a batch
| will just go to the landfill because of contamination and
| it's understandable why people might be inclined to just
| throw everything away.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Serious is when you talk about getting everyone (esp. like Coca
| Cola and Nestle) to stop using tons of plastic in packaging
| _before_ you talk about recycling those tons.
|
| Recycling [edit: plastic] is a losing game. It degrades during
| recycling and its uses are limited. The only winning move is to
| not generate waste unnecessarily unless it biodegrades quickly
| on human timescales or is at least non-toxic.
|
| There's a lot of bullshit in recycling industry that it's hard
| to take claims at face value anymore. The whole industry
| sometimes look like one big virtue signaling and PR campaign to
| get more subsidies from the gov. 200 tons per hour doesn't say
| much about what it recycles to, how can it be used, how much
| micro and nanoplastics it puts out into the environment as side
| effect, if you didn't just put it all on a ship and sent off to
| Malaysia. And ramping up to 200 tons per hour while
| manufacturers are ramping up to 200 tons per minute would be a
| waste of time and resources compared to talking to those
| manufacturers in the first place, why do they get to do it?
|
| And the deeper problem is that it's _all great_ from economic
| perspective if more stuff is produced, more money is spent,
| people are busy, jobs are created, cogs are spinning, I mean
| another whole industry to clean up after one shitty industry?
| is it christmas already?! can 't wait for the nanoplastics
| cleanup industry next! as long as Coca Cola and friends keep
| churning out more and more plastic, there will be enough things
| to do to keep everyone busy and productive!
| jibbit wrote:
| I think it's saying that people understood the message of
| recycling to be "it's ok to use as much single-use plastic as
| you like" - so yeah it backfired?
| alentred wrote:
| > That doesn't mean that recycling has "backfired".
|
| > This problem is routinely being solved by mostly boring but
| useful heavy machinery.
|
| So, yes, it did. You are making the same point as in the
| article: as we focused the consumer attention on "reduce, reuse
| and recycle" (which we actually did), focus is lost from other
| problems (overproduction, microplastics in consumer waste) and
| solutions (awareness, modernizing the recycling plants).
| mariusor wrote:
| > focus is lost from other problems (overproduction,
| microplastics in consumer waste) and solutions (awareness,
| modernizing the recycling plants).
|
| Which average Joe can do nothing.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| "Reduce" actually _does_ attack the production side. Overall,
| something not bought = something not produced.
|
| So does "Reuse". If a take a throwaway plastic bag & reuse it
| 4x, I have reduced its waste footprint to 1/5th of the use-
| once scenario.
|
| Only recycling doesn't do this. It defers the waste problem
| to 3rd parties, which may or may not do what one would _hope_
| they do. That 's... kind of weak.
|
| Which is why I go for the reduce option if possible. Whenever
| I'm about to buy something, I ask myself: do I _need_ this?
| How _am_ I going to use this? (vs. what _could_ I
| potentially, possibly, one day, do with it). No clear answer
| to these questions = no buy. Environmental footprint of an
| item can weigh into such decisions.
|
| It's a simple approach, but produces a surprising difficult
| hurdle in most cases.
|
| Food purchases pass this hurdle 0 problem. For other things,
| "because I _want_ it, got the money, my choice " (usually)
| doesn't cut it any more. Buying a winter coat 50% off won't
| cut it when it's mid summer & you've got an old but good
| winter coat sitting ready.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I like your appraisal, especially "something not bought =
| something not produced". But I don't understand your final
| paragraph. How does the situation change if you replace an
| old but good winter coat in the winter rather than the
| summer? The season in which you buy something seems
| irrelevant to me.
| winrid wrote:
| It's also the fact that the recycling systems are still behind
| consumer expectations.
|
| Many would look at a plastic bag and expect that it could be
| broken down and reused, or that the glass in a lightbulb could
| be recovered. If we cared more about reuse than cost, we would.
| Hopefully sorting machines will continue to improve and be able
| to sort out bags without getting clogged all the time.
|
| I agree it hasn't "backfired" in any way.
| runsWphotons wrote:
| had no idea you cant recycle plastic bags. really? why not?
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| You can, but generally only in certain places in their own
| bin. Some grocery stores and some Home Depots offer plastic
| bag recycling.
| winrid wrote:
| They can be, if pre-sorted correctly. But just putting them
| with the rest of the recyclables usually causes problems
| with clogging equipment - they get wrapped around things,
| then everything has to stop and workers have to go into the
| machines to clean them out. I assume future generations of
| equipment will improve on this but this equipment is pretty
| expensive to replace so it will take a while...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > They can be, if pre-sorted correctly.
|
| There's no way to do this in my area. Nobody will accept
| plastic bags for recycling.
| keskival wrote:
| It depends. In Spain plastic bags are recycled along with
| other plastic and metal in the same bin.
| modo_mario wrote:
| A lot of things you'd think can be recycled actually can't
| be. This video gives a good overview about the reason this
| belief is so prevalent.:
|
| https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g
| omgmajk wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the outcome of that survey was even more stark,
| with many incorrectly putting non-recyclable waste, such as
| plastic bags and lightbulbs, into the virtual recycle bin.
|
| In some countries there are recycle bins for this, where was this
| study conducted?
| [deleted]
| slantaclaus wrote:
| This is exactly what I thought the article would be talking about
| --people not knowing what is recyclable in the first place.
| gcanyon wrote:
| While consumer efforts are good, it's important to remember and
| focus on industrial waste, which is a far greater problem:
| https://stanfordmag.org/contents/industrial-versus-consumer-...
| billti wrote:
| Or even the different scales of your own waste. Whenever I'm
| worrying about which bin to put my coffee stirrer in, I
| sometimes think about the shear volume of landfill that got
| hauled from our house when we did a major renovation. I'm sure
| 10 lifetimes of coffee stirrers wouldn't come close.
|
| I think worrying about things like single-use shopping bags and
| compostable straws is great from a "keep pollution out of the
| environment" perspective, but I doubt they make a huge
| difference from a landfill usage perspective.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| America seems determined to do as little recycling as
| possible for weird culture war reasons, but even in the US
| construction rubble is fairly widely re-used and recycled:
|
| https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-
| construction-...
|
| > 600 million tons of C&D debris were generated in the United
| States in 2018, which is more than twice the amount of
| generated municipal solid waste.
|
| > Demolition represents more than 90 percent of total C&D
| debris generation, while construction represents less than 10
| percent.
|
| > Just over 455 million tons of C&D debris were directed to
| next use and just under 145 million tons were sent to
| landfills.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| Remembering and focusing intently. Why is nothing getting done
| about this?
| pjc50 wrote:
| My personal bugbear, and that of quite a few people in the
| Firth of Forth, is the Mossmorran Flare:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt
|
| At one point I estimated that's about a hundred plastic straws
| worth of ethylene per second. There's not a lot of individual
| recycling that can be done about that.
| supazek wrote:
| Okay I'm focused on it
| staunton wrote:
| ... and then do something about it
| [deleted]
| subroutine wrote:
| like what? vote or something
| themitigating wrote:
| Multiple things can be considered at once
| Y_Y wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. Some days even a single thing is a
| challenge.
|
| Anyway, at the risk of rehashing a very old argument, OP
| presumably means that if you want to reduce the effects
| (landfill, increased consumption of plastics etc) then the
| best place to apply your effort is in industrial contexts.
|
| It's good to reduce any waste but it's rational to apply your
| finite efforts where they'll give the best return.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Yep, exactly this.
| themitigating wrote:
| * then the best place to apply your effort is in industrial
| contexts.*
|
| The vast majority of people don't have control over
| industrial waste. Of course I can vote for someone who says
| they will but that doesn't require focus only an action at
| most once a year.
|
| I believe the OP is using whataboutism to allow himself to
| be selfish. "Why recycle when celebrities fly on private
| jets" or to make it more obvious "Why should I be good if
| another person isn't"
| pessimizer wrote:
| Whataboutism is a bad term.
|
| I think of it as the socialist slaveowner problem: "You
| can't call me a bad socialist, I'll release my slaves
| when _everybody_ releases their slaves. Compared to world
| slavery, I 'm just a drop in the bucket (I own barely 5%
| of them.) Actually, your obsession with me instead of the
| real problem says a lot about _you._ So convenient for
| you to ignore the 95% and indulge your petty, childish
| bigotry against equestrians. "
|
| _There 's no ethical consumption under capitalism!_
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes. I remember being taught in grade school that "reduce, reuse,
| recycle" is the order of importance. Reducing consumption is the
| most important thing. Keeping existing things in use is next up.
| Recycling is the worst of the three options -- it's just better
| than the landfill.
| grecy wrote:
| Another way to say it - "Of the things you _should_ be doing,
| recycling is the _worst_ ".
| secretsatan wrote:
| I do seem to have more plastic waste now then 10 years ago in my
| food shopping, one I find particularly annoying is what used to
| be loose fruit and veg is now packaged in set portions, which
| seems to double the waste, not only do I have to buy more than I
| need and have to throw some away (to the compost disposal), but
| they seem to use even more packaging
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Related observation - in supermarkets I use there is an option
| to buy some vegetables by weight using own reusable bug. It
| looks like a way to reduce plastic waste but the same
| vegetables pre-packaged in plastic bags are almost always
| cheaper. I wonder why? Supermarket make extra profit on
| environmental conscious people?
| thinkingemote wrote:
| In the UK for the vegetables I buy, I have not observed this.
| They are cheaper loose. (One exception is apples which
| sometimes are priced per apple, than weight, for the lunch
| crowd).
|
| It's helpful that here the price per weight is given on the
| shelf ticket for both loose and prepackaged items making it
| easier to compare.
|
| People seem to spend more for packaging and convenience.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Organic fruit is more expensive than non-organic fruit,
| more expensive fruit is considered more luxury, and as a
| result supermarkets always sell organic fruit in wasteful
| but 'luxurious' packaging. In my corner of Britain, I don't
| think I've seen organic bananas sold loose, for instance.
|
| Another example is the toilet paper company which, in order
| to brand themselves as eco-friendly, use recycled,
| unbleached paper. Sounds great until you see that each roll
| is individually wrapped... in glossy, bleached paper!
| gampleman wrote:
| So I read somewhere that apparently packaging can greatly
| increase the shelf life of the produce and so the overall waste
| is actually reduced by using packaging.
| modo_mario wrote:
| Waste for the seller and potentialy consumer no? I'd argue
| the plastic wrap is more of a long term issue than the
| cucumber.
| ldehaan wrote:
| [dead]
| xeyownt wrote:
| What is this even saying?
|
| I saw nothing mentioned that was backfiring, even less so
| spectacularly.
| hnbad wrote:
| Did you read past the headline? "Reduce, reuse, recycle" means
| "avoid buying more things, use the things you already have and
| recycle instead of throwing away". The inclusion of "recycle"
| led to a hyperfocus on that last, least effective, part of the
| guidance at the cost of the other two. It backfired by making
| consumers think they're doing their part by buying products
| that include recycled materials or throwing their trash in the
| recycling bin, rather than simply buying less or not buying
| things or buying things that last longer and continuing to use
| them.
|
| Of course this isn't on the consumers but the producers. The
| article explicitly says the focus on reycling hasn't helped
| reduce overproduction, which isn't a surprise as the economy
| grows by producing (and selling) and recycling is orthogonal to
| that whereas reducing/reusing runs counter to it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Plastic manufacturers should be taxed on their output. Let's
| start with 50% of their sales price and see how it goes.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I agree with this, and surprised no one brought up how hard it
| is to recycle plastic. By hard I mean the cost in money and
| energy, thus more CO2.
|
| It is time to eliminate plastic containers and force the use of
| containers that are easy to recycle, glass and paper. Yes that
| will be a pain, but I remember when everything came in glass
| and paper. People were able to deal wit it, but that was in a
| day when you bought things at ma and pa stores. It is all the
| large companies that push plastics, it moves the cost from them
| to someone else.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Backfired?
|
| > While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the
| landfill
|
| Oh, backfired _in the US_. Gotcha. Right. And because it didn 't
| work out in the US, there's absolutely no way that any other
| country could have this shit figured out, right?
|
| Landfills. Jesus.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Landfills. Jesus.
|
| The US is a very lightly populated country.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Mine has an even lower population density and we still
| incinerate our trash instead of putting it on landfills.
|
| The environmental benefits are huge.
| vore wrote:
| Is incineration really that much better? You're trading off one
| kind of pollution for another: toxic emissions and toxic
| byproducts that still have to be disposed of in some way...
|
| One way or another, countries have to deal with non-recyclable,
| non-compostable waste, and all solutions to it are pretty
| nasty.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You get toxic ash for a landfill, if you have a proper smoke
| treatment, but you could argue that the waste was already
| toxic before the burning and far less so now since many
| toxins are destroyed in fire.
|
| Also the volume is smaller for the ash.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The thing is, with incineration you also lose all the raw
| materials and the energy contained within them, as well as
| release all the CO2 and other greenhouse gases - not a good
| thing given that most of the stuff ending up in
| incinerators is fossil in origin.
|
| Landfills at least can be mined in the future when we
| develop at-scale actual recycling capabilities for plastics
| (e.g. GMO bacteria/fungi that break down the polymers in
| the waste into precursors that can be used to create new
| plastics).
| uoaei wrote:
| The thing is, virtually every single incineration plant
| also generates electricity, typically at smaller scales
| than dedicated plants to serve smaller regions, but
| distributed/decentralized generation is a big win for
| resilience of the grid overall.
|
| Also please provide at least one citation where "maybe
| we'll totally reverse the negative effects of this thing
| we put into our environment" has been fulfilled. I can
| only think of failures to live up to that expectation:
| PFAS, microplastics, oil spills, etc.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You want to separate e.g. iron from the trash before
| burning. I even think you can separate aluminum.
|
| Plastic is not a raw material really. It is probably
| better to burn it instead of doing landfills with it
| waiting for some miracle bacteria.
|
| We could use paper and cardboard for most plastic
| packaging and many uses of plastic packaging is useless,
| like those hard plastics around scissors or whatever in
| the store.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It is probably better to burn it instead of doing
| landfills with it waiting for some miracle bacteria.
|
| Still releases fossil-origin CO2, we can't afford that
| for global warming reasons. In a landfill the CO2 remains
| trapped.
|
| Agree on your reduction point, that is long overdue but
| will only happen with significant governmental
| regulations.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > In a landfill the CO2 remains trapped.
|
| Some, yes, but not all.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Plastics take decades centuries to degrade, and most of
| that degradation is physical - it gets degraded to
| microplastics. As soon as it's in a landfill where it's
| not in motion or exposed to sunlight, it's essentially
| conserved for human lifetime cycles.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I was going to write that plastics has to be bogger all
| in weight, but it is 100 kg per person and year in Europe
| and 200 kg in the US, which is kinda surprising.
|
| There has to be due to industrial or commercial usage
| right? I mean, I would be surprised if I used more than
| even 10 kg of plastics per year. That is like 1000s of
| plastic bags, and I and most people use paper bags
| anyways.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That figure may include clothing, of which an utter utter
| majority is plastics-based nowadays.
| defrost wrote:
| The primary researchers had a note on this:
| we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse
|
| Consuming less and eschewing excessive over production is
| just crazy though, right?
| vore wrote:
| I'm rebutting the parent post that claims countries other
| than the US somehow have a better solution to landfilling
| for non-recyclable waste.
|
| Of course solving the root cause is the right thing to do,
| no argument from me!
| defrost wrote:
| I got that, all the same it seemed like as good a thread
| branch as any to emphasis that the OP research article
| really stresses an _excess_ of waste as the primary issue
| before hitting the break down of _how_ to deal with that.
|
| I might suggest that very likely the USofA has a mush
| higher "waste generated per capita" than many other
| counries .. and that a number of countries are having to
| deal with mountains of waste shipped onto their shores by
| the USofA (and a few other first world offenders).
|
| I have no argument with you, we seem to be on a similar
| page here :)
| henrikschroder wrote:
| A million times yes.
|
| If you gather all your garbage, especially plastic garbage,
| and burn it, recovering heat and energy, you can offset a lot
| of oil- and gas-powered electricity generation. As an aside,
| it doesn't matter how many plastic straws and plastic bags
| you make, as long as you burn them after use.
|
| Landfills also emit greenhouse gases, uncontrolled, over a
| long period of time, so it's not so much of a trade-off as
| you think it is.
|
| Since 1990, Sweden has cut greenhouse gas emissions from
| trash to one fourth of what it was, and that's by moving from
| landfills to trash incineration:
| https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-
| statistik/klimat/va... (Blue is greenhouse gases from
| landfills, dark blue is emissions from trash incinerators.)
| audunw wrote:
| Of course incineration is better. Modern incineration plants
| are very effective at filtering out the nasty stuff. And it's
| way easier to make sure a small quantity of very concentrated
| nasty stuff is never released into nature, than dispersed
| chemicals and heavy metals in a huge quantity of trash in a
| landfill.
|
| What's more, we can use the energy for electricity and
| district heating. It's very common in Northern Europe now.
| Copenhagen has one right in their city (with a ski slope on
| it)
|
| CO2 emissions should tend towards net zero as we move towards
| a future where we don't dig up fossil hydrocarbons anymore.
| In the meantime, the trash power plants is mostly offsetting
| fossil fuel power plants anyway.
| lrem wrote:
| A boatload of waste containing an amount of toxins come in.
| At the price of using up filters, a truckload of ash
| containing a smaller amount of toxins comes out. And you get
| quite a bit of energy out of the process too.
|
| Sure, the energy you get out isn't worth as much as the
| materials and labour you put in. If that's a modern plant,
| you also recover metals from the waste - a roughly break-even
| process that allows you to recover material that was
| previously unrecyclable. The ash coming out at the end is
| orders of magnitude less voluminous than the input, uniform,
| powder and dry. The Internet claims this gets used in
| construction as bulk fill and road underlays, but I haven't
| seen any official materials about that.
|
| All in all the process is economically viable (especially
| when you have no cheap land to waste, but probably otherwise
| too, see the case of Sweden importing Italian trash) and
| seems strongly preferable ecologically.
| hnbad wrote:
| Did you read past that one sentence? It backfired in that the
| slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and everyone just skips 1
| and 2 and thinks recycling is magic and calls it a day.
|
| Which of course has more to do with there not being much profit
| in the first two but it's relatively easy to cash in on making
| your product "recyclable" or using "recycled materials" and
| making the consumers think that this means they're basically
| resource neutral. You can't buy an Amazon Echo product without
| Amazon telling you how they're so green it would almost be
| worse for the climate not to buy them (yes, that's an
| exaggeration but the messaging is pretty aggressive).
|
| Heck, the first two parts of the slogan literally mean "don't
| buy new things" (reduce = don't buy more, reuse = use what you
| already have).
| wunderland wrote:
| We're staring the obvious in the face for decades:
| overconsumption is unsustainable. But our entire economy is based
| off this wasteful mode of production, so we're sold lies and
| happily latch onto fantasies to convince us that we can somehow
| overcome the negative externalities of profit maximization. As
| long as there are economic incentives to create trash, we will
| fill the oceans with garbage. I used to believe that we could
| solve this with "market solutions" which incorporate the true
| environmental cost of wasteful production, but this is just
| another fantasy. Even if the real cost of pollution could be
| known, there is no profit incentive to enact such a scheme.
|
| We've got about 20 more years of maximizing shareholder value
| before we run off an ecological cliff.
| taylodl wrote:
| People are going to learn the hard way that The Market they've
| been worshipping is a false idol. Don't get me wrong - I
| advocate for a regulated market economy, but the key point is
| "regulated." We have 200-300 years of experience now showing
| the kinds of problems vaunted market is unable to solve.
| drc500free wrote:
| Agree, a functioning market that builds collective value is
| what you get once you've regulated away all the easy, value-
| destroying ways of making a living.
|
| Until you get rid of the ability to just take someone else's
| stuff by force or fraud, those approaches force out value
| creation.
| pabs3 wrote:
| I feel like recycling solves the problem at the wrong end of the
| material pipeline.
|
| Why do we buy so much single-use packaging, so many things that
| are unrepairable, too costly to repair, hard to disassemble, or
| that have externalities that were not solved before the product
| went to market?
|
| Require anyone who sells a new physical product have to accept
| returns of that physical product at the end of its lifetime.
| Don't throw out food packaging, return it to the supermarket.
| Don't throw out a dead TV, return it to the electronics store.
| Stores will send those dead products back upstream. Companies
| will quickly figure out how to make products that are reusable,
| repairable, disassemblable and recyclable.
| veave wrote:
| >Why do we buy so much single-use packaging, so many things
| that are unrepairable, too costly to repair, hard to
| disassemble, or that have externalities that were not solved
| before the product went to market?
|
| Because it's easier, cheaper and better?
|
| >Require anyone who sells a new physical product have to accept
| returns of that physical product at the end of its lifetime.
|
| That will translate into even more expensive products for
| consumers. Thanks but no thanks.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > Because it's easier, cheaper and better?
|
| Cheaper to whom? Better to whom?
|
| > That will translate into even more expensive products for
| consumers.
|
| You know what's even more expensive for consumers in the long
| run? But of course you don't think in the long run. Or
| anybody else than yourself. Or anything at all, really. I'm
| sorry that people like you exist. So blinded by cheap bling.
|
| One generation of wealthy Western people filling their homes
| with crap because it's "cheap" and "easy", blissfully unaware
| or unwilling to think about the very real external costs
| borne by other people somewhere else. Or some _when_ else for
| that matter - so incredibly selfish that you 're entirely
| willing to make the world worse for your children and their
| children, just in order to enjoy limitless consumerism for a
| few decades. Feeling good about that?
| veave wrote:
| >Cheaper to whom? Better to whom?
|
| The consumer at least. Probably the producer as well but I
| don't know as I'm not one.
|
| Regarding your other paragraphs, you seem very bitter. Try
| therapy.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Therapy is a band aid on the deep laceration that is the
| anthropocene extinction event.
|
| I don't need to feel good about ecological catastrophe. I
| am happy to cultivate my hatred for those complicit
| commercial transactions.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Harsh but ultimately true. Cheap consumer goods are
| subsidised with a loan from the environment - one day we'll
| need to start paying that off, so we better start reducing
| the deficit.
| c22 wrote:
| It's cheapest for consumers not to pay for trash pickup at
| all but instead to just dump their refuse in the nearest
| gully.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Recycling plastic is a pile of garbage.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I am not sure if this is supposed to be an exception, but looking
| at the authors other articles, it seems like they are satire or
| comedy of some sort:
|
| https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai
| pharmakom wrote:
| Is this not inevitable?
|
| No corporation is going to push Reduce and Reuse over Recycle.
| It's incompatible with growth (in a narrow sense).
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