Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-trash-piles-china-door-recycling.html

by kushti • 8 years ago

214 272 8 years ago

dang• 8 years ago

Related from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168.

ggm2• 8 years ago

John McCarthy wrote about how future generations would welcome us storing immensely valuable VOCs and complex chemicals and metals underground for them. In all seriousness, waste stream management is like education or healthcare: it's only a net cost if you believe the externalities aren't part of your economic model. If you go full lifecycle, it's jobs, and revenue, and adds to the economy in lots of useful ways.

Turning down radiation storage is like saying no to free money. We should all welcome better long-term storage and compete to host it.

AtlasBarfed• 8 years ago

Externalities involve regulation, and that means it isn't real economics to the laissez faire believers of the magic self-correcting free market. I'd like to say they are a fringe, but the think tanks and endowed chairs have made them the dominant thinking in popular culture and, sadly, American politics.

Radioation storage is a product of obsolete solid rod reactors. LFTRs and other reactors can use them for fuel.

dragonwriter• 8 years ago

Externalities involve regulation

Regulation is one possible response to externalities, but externalities don't fundamentally involve radiation.

and that means it isn't real economics to the laissez faire believers of the magic self-correcting free market.

To be fair, there are more pragmatic laissez-faire types that acknowledge the existence of externalities but merely deny that regulation mitigates them in practice, suggesting instead that if you respond to an extension with regulation you've now got two problems.

And even most people who aren't hardcore laissez-faire types acknowledge that regulatory capture is a real thing.

Leary• 8 years ago

Rumor has it China stop importing plastic after this documentary came out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54

schiffern7• 8 years ago

Great documentary, thanks.

This puts the recent "90% of ocean plastic comes from Asian/African rivers" story[1] in a drastically new light.

The issue was previously framed in terms of poor waste management due to lack of infrastructure for native waste (agreed) and uneducated Asian/African consumers (a blame-laundering technique that the disposable product industry has already successfully deployed in the US[2]). But on further examination, it seems the countries with "good infrastructure"[3] and "well-educated wasters" may be part of (or even a majority of) the problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913389

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern...

[3] "good waste infrastructure" being, in part, a euphemism for "keep that expensive-to-handle waste in a box until it's outside our border so it's technically Not Our Problem"

sundvor• 8 years ago

I found that really hard to watch, especially the children stepping on deity knows what part.

Even then I wish everyone would see it.

Humanity sucks sometimes ... if not most of the time.

RobertRoberts8• 8 years ago

A friend of mine has a chronically homeless brother that still does day jobs (doesn't do drugs so is consistently hired) and he said he was working cleaning out the toxic ashes from trash burning center and was treated badly.

"..they made him wear a radioactive exposure badge and fired him when the badge tipped over the safe range."

The union bosses wouldn't even go down there and called orders from megaphones.

There are videos/photos of many other countries that look much worse than this, think India, even Mexico.

Edit: The homeless man I mentioned lives in a major city in the US, not a third world country.

throw2016• 8 years ago

Difficult to watch even for the jaded and I suggest those who are sensitive don't.

These are all sorts of externalities of out current lifestyles that these poor desperate people have to deal with. This is simply a reflection of an inhuman society we have created, making money is meaningless if you can't take care of your own. Dehumanizing others only dehumanizes ourselves.

Its not sustainable and extraordinarily wasteful packaging, convenience lifestyles and abuse of plastic currently benefits too many businesses. Uncontrolled free markets with only concern of profits with no concern for the environment and complete lack of responsibility for other people is solely to be blamed.

AlfeG• 8 years ago

Great documentary. Thanks.

Oyther countries can handle nuclear process, but cannot handle trash sorting

steve19• 8 years ago

I wonder how many people have lost their jobs. I don't blame China for banning it, it makes sense, but I would hate to be employed in China knowing that the government might any day ban it with no notice.

konschubert• 8 years ago

What are you implying? Politics happen in every country. Banning the import is the same effect as starting a trade war or adding high import tax.

al_ramich• 8 years ago

not something I had much background on but did a little reading and the numbers prior to the ban are pretty incredible. Interesting to see the shift in projected import/exports of plastics to 2030. A big shift in China policy.

http://geographical.co.uk/people/development/item/2811-china...

beerlord• 8 years ago

India has banned single-use plastics (starting 2022).

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/single-use-plastic-ban-...

Other countries simply need to do the same. France has banned certain single-use plastic items starting in 2020.

If a side-effect is less processed food and fast-food being consumed, then great.

jakobegger4• 8 years ago

This is the only real solution. Everything else is pointless.

As long as we keep producing plastics, they will end up in the environment, and whatever doesn't will be a pain to recycle.

We already have alternatives for almost everything. We have single use plates and cutlery made from cardboard or wood, we have compostable packaging foil for vegetables and compostable trash can liners. The only problem is adoption -- as long as plastic is slightly cheaper, no one will use it.

I really hope the EU comes down hard on plastic packaging -- imagine if all packaging was compostable, you could just throw it on a pile in your back yard and it would turn into fertile soil within a couple of months!

pjc50• 8 years ago

imagine if all packaging was compostable

How much would the loss rates of packaged goods increase? Shelf stability is a very useful property which saves food from being wasted.

nakkijono2• 8 years ago

Burning the plastic in dedicated facilities is the only good solution. Use it for energy, and burn less gas & oil as a result. Everything else tends to have a bigger carbon footprint.

Burning the stuff is profitable even today.

Compostable will produce methane etc., especially in your back yard.

gbrown• 8 years ago

Lots of that "compostable" stuff won't break down in home compost bins, and instead needs to be ground up and hot composted in a municipal setting.

wool_gather• 8 years ago

imagine if all packaging was compostable, you could just throw it on a pile in your back yard and it would turn into fertile soil within a couple of months

Nope, this is emphatically not how the compostable materials you're talking about work. I invite you to try it: you will not see much degradation of the object even after a year, even with shredding and in a well-maintained pile.

Almost all of these materials need special composting processing; one of the key requirements is adding quite a bit of heat. I've known several restaurants/groceries trying to use compostable cups/utensils/etc. whose compost service eventually required the pickup to be completely free of these items. Portland, OR has municipal compost; they likewise cannot process these items: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/...

These materials may be better than "traditional" plastic, but the "compostable" nature is rather oversold. They still need to be handled in a very specific manner. They won't break down without quite a bit of help.

raverbashing2• 8 years ago

This really seems like a problem that could be helped by smarter automation (and a lot of "thinking outside the box")

If plastic bags get stuck to the machines, then maybe the way to getting rid of them is looking at what happens with them as opposed to other materials.

Also automated identification of materials (by optical inspection or dedicated sensors) looks like it could help.

cdolan3• 8 years ago

This tech is already applied to MRFs and it still doesn’t work 100% if the time, causing downtime on the line, and lost revenues.

mihaifm• 8 years ago

I don't understand why it's so hard to build a machine that separates plastic from other materials. I mean in agriculture we have machines that separate tiny seeds from anything else, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have a plastic sorting machine.

lbriner3• 8 years ago

Because of the massive variation in shapes and sizes, the fact that some plastics might have other trash inside them and that plastic drinks bottles are usually more than one type of plastic. There are machines but they can only perform basic sorting so you still need people to do the "intelligent" part.

schiffern7• 8 years ago

I don't understand why it's so hard ... we have machines that separate tiny seeds

Not hard, just expensive. And understanding how seeds are separated (not only that they are separated) makes it clear why plastics require so many more steps.

For seeds, it's a two-step process.

First comes threshing[1], which is the act of physically breaking the seeds off the plant. Basically they solved this problem by hitting the stalks against a solid surface. This works because all the plants are the same type and age, so you can dial in a force that will break the seeds _off_ without breaking them _apart_.

This won't work for plastics, because they're combined with all sorts of other materials that whacking won't dislodge. One shot of that "Plastic China" documentary[2] shows a worker using a box cutter to remove a plastic label that's shrink-wrapped around (not glued to) a crushed container.

The second step is called winnowing[3], and it's basically just blowing air through the falling seeds to separate them aerodynamically from the straw and chaff. This works because seeds have a higher ballistic coefficient (mass/drag). Winnowing is also done with screens or slats, relying on the fact that seeds are of uniform size.

But plastics have all different shapes and sizes. Wind winnowing can certainly be used as part of a processing chain (eg to separate films from bulk plastics), and so can screens, but they're nowhere near a complete solution.

Because of these complexities, automatically processing plastic at scale requires a lot more than just those two steps (which nowadays are combined together with reaping in the cleverly-named "combine harvester" or combine[4]). That means it's expensive, and that means someone in China with cheap labor and "externalized" pollution costs (read: make your neighbors get sick and die, but don't even have the decency to pay their doctor bills or keep their windowed spouses/orphaned children off the street) can outbid you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshing

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17678513

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

There's obviously complicating factors.

If a consumer thinks recycling is some sophisticated magic, they're likely to use the plastic bag they think is recyclable to encapsulate a load of mixed recycling while it accumulates indoors. Assume this bag now contains a combination of paper, plastic, and cans.

Or if they have a plastic container full of fresh fruit with a tuna can from lunch, they might put the empty metal can within the now empty plastic container, closing the container to limit the odor. Eventually this winds up in the recycling bin as metal nested within plastic.

Automatically identifying and separating these instances intact, I imagine, is non-trivial.

What I don't understand is why we need to separate everything intact and can't just shred it all to a uniform size then automate sorting and washing that product.

Mediterraneo10• 8 years ago

It has been well over a decade since supermarkets in many countries got automated bottle-return machines. With all the advances in computer vision, is there really no way to have machines that can economically scan returned plastic for its recycling code and direct it towards the appropriate bin, so that the recycler gets a supply of correctly sorted plastic?

lbriner3• 8 years ago

Recycling codes are not consistently applied, a bottle might have lost its label, many plastics use mixed types and lots of food and drink containers are polluted by the food and liquids so they are still dirty.

You can tell people to wash things and separate them but you can't really police it and when it doesn't happen, you have to inspect everything to ensure that nothing gets through!

michaelt• 8 years ago

I just finished a bottle of Coca-Cola while I was on a train.

The bottle is made of polyethylene terepthalate, while the cap, ring and wrap-around label are made of polypropylene. There's a few drops of coke left in it too. Oh, and I squashed it to save space in the recycling bin.

I put it in a 'mixed recycling' bin that also contained prepackaged sandwich boxes, paper towels, plastic bags, and a banana skin.

I think this would be very difficult to separate automatically.

maxxxxx4• 8 years ago

Separating and processing trash would be a great example where ML, AI, robotics and other stuff would really help progress. It's a really hard problem that should be very interesting to work on.

Instead we have the best minds of our generation working on building total surveillance machines and hacking the human brain to sell more crap.

rusk4• 8 years ago

This can only be a good thing in the long run. Exporting recyclable waste is like exporting bales of dollar bills, and paying for it.

cdolan3• 8 years ago

I get your point but the “recyclables” we produce as Americans are not really recyclables. They are 90% recycling, 10% trash, or worse.

rusk4• 8 years ago

You mean that the composition of the recyclables is 10% non-recyclable thus rendering the entire thing non-recyclable? That is indeed regrettable but it's never too late to change.

lbriner3• 8 years ago

Lots of materials cost more to recycle than to make from virgin materials, even glass which is relatively easy to clean and process.

Recycling creates jobs, which might be considered a benefit but from purely financial means, the cheapest method is to burn stuff and generate electricity sadly.

mrpopo• 8 years ago

This comes up a lot when talking about recycling, but really the issue here is that the environment is never counted as a financial asset. Carbon/pollution taxes cannot come soon enough.

nakkijono2• 8 years ago

Burning is completely viable and the most environmentally friendly option, when it is done in proper facilities and with high heat. Especially for consumer trash that cannot be effectively recycled. Since there will be need for load following power plants anyway, why not use trash to power those instead of raw gas & oil.

lilbobbytables• 8 years ago

I'm not convinced of that. If you watch any documentaries or read any articles about the processing that goes on you'll see that it's very labor intensive. That means it's only exporting (or importing) dollar bills for certain markets.

rusk4• 8 years ago

It's all a matter of process innovation. When there's enough financial incentives somebody will figure out how to do it cost effectively. Up until now it was more cost effective to export it.

hugh4life• 8 years ago

Well in the short run, many people had a habit of recycling(like my parents) who don't anymore sense the local place doesn't take the materials anymore.

romjak• 8 years ago

It would be interesting to have data about the global movement of raw materials in finished products and the restulting waste, net import and export by country, to see where waste is accumulating and where the consumption actually takes place.

pagnol• 8 years ago

If you live in the Berlin area like me and are looking for ways to produce less waste, then check out this store called Unverpackt: https://original-unverpackt.de/

It's a physical store which sells most everything a normal supermarket does but without the disposable packaging.

dmortin2• 8 years ago

Do they sell food? (meat, frozen things, etc.) Because buying food creates the most waste for me.

mgbmtl5• 8 years ago

In many supermarkets/butchers, you can also bring your own resealable plastic containers for meats.

Most will usually insist on washing the container for you (because of regulations), so it's usually better to ask off-peak hours.

kazen442• 8 years ago

so basically how stuff was sold prior to world war 2 or how most stuff is sold on lcoal markets today?

phobosdeimos• 8 years ago

Demographics were very different back then. Nowadays we have one person households. Also nowadays nobody peels potatoes anymore. I honestly wouldn't know how.

jbob20004• 8 years ago

This is basically Bulk Barn but without plastic bags, neat!

GuB-42• 8 years ago

How much does it cost?

Food without packaging is becoming popular in France too. However, it is usually organic food and it is typically much more expensive than regular, packaged food. I don't want organic. I just want to avoid packaging, and favor local food.

Unfortunately, all these "green" initiatives seem to be based on market segmentation than on real environmental concerns. There is a class of people who prefer organic, dislike packaging and have money. It is good for business and shops make money off it. Is it a good thing. However, I think it would be even better if we could stress the point that green can be cheap.

schiffern7• 8 years ago

However, it is usually organic food and it is typically much more expensive than regular, packaged food. I don't want organic. I just want to avoid packaging

Just avoiding packaging is more expensive, because as this excellent article points out[1], packaging represents the automation of the distribution chain.

Some of the first packaging arose in the late 19th century. Some of the earliest packaging was for Uneeda Biscuits. They were packaged in a box with wax paper that sealed in the biscuits so they wouldn't go stale. Packaging was all about easing distribution for producers, because before that, everything was sold in bulk containers. The transformation of production and distribution as well as retail sales—going from mom and pop stores to the chain supermarkets we have today—means that packaging represents the automation of the distribution system. I think producers are very conscious of how helpful packaging is in helping them centralize their businesses. In doing that, they get to downsize and streamline and create economies of scale that they couldn't create if they didn't get to consolidate—which is what a lot of the drive behind switching from the refillable to the disposable bottle and can was about. The beer and soda industries consolidated massively in the post-war period, and the number of producers shrank dramatically. And this massive consolidation in both of those industries was facilitated by the switch to disposable containers. The industry no longer has the necessity for regional bottling plants where trucks can only go so far to deliver the products because then they have to go retrieve the empties. Now they can just drive straight through, one way, and they don't have to take anything back. They can go to the next central hub, pick up more stuff, keep driving and drop it off.

In the same way that containerization resulted in massive automation of ports and shipping (thousands of dock-workers vs. a few crane/truck operators), disposable packaging has automated terrestrial distribution channels. This has resulted in massive cost reductions, leading to large scale and consolidation ("let's ship from a single factory to the whole world" vs. "let's ship from a thousand local producers located within 100 miles of the end-consumer").

Packaging is really about automation, which is really about supply-chain lengthening, which is really about maximally concentrating profit.

green can be cheap

Couldn't agree more. Low-tech is best tech. The permaculture folks realized this years ago.

The shortest/greenest supply chain is having your "grocery aisle" growing in the front yard (designed for zero-inputs[2] and near-zero-labor). Perhaps the ultimate solution isn't "Super Recycling" ie automated plastic sorting (still needed for other plastics btw) but "Super Reducing" -- an inexpensive easy-to-setup food garden that makes the entire supply chain (or most of it) obsolute. It needs to be something that people in suburbs can A) actually use and B) get past their HOA/neighborhood association.

The idiot-proof recycling bin is great, but we also need the idiot-proof organic garden.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (I know I keep hammering this article, but the author nailed all these issues way back in 2005)

[2] Yes, zero-input gardening is possible even though you're removing material. Soil organisms continuously break down rock for minerals, and plants fix nitrogen and carbon from the atmosphere. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

IshKebab2• 8 years ago

the city wants to "better educate our residents about what should and should not be recycled"

In the UK they don't make any effort to do this and it really annoys me. There are so many things that aren't just aluminium cans or glass bottles. Can I recycle them? No way of knowing.

JoeAltmaier3• 8 years ago

In the US even when they do try, they fail. "Toxic waste day" at the dump, I brought a pickup load of old chemical bottles from the shed, old fluorescent tubes, alkaline batteries. And took it all home again - they didn't know what to do with any of it. One guy just suggested dumping it out on my driveway to 'dry up' in the sun.

zip1234• 8 years ago

I had a similar experience at hazardous waste day. I think they need to train the workers better (at all).

danans3• 8 years ago

As a contrast, the folks at my local hazardous waste disposal facility (Alameda County, CA), were very knowledgeable and have taken all the items you listed as having been rejected at yours. So there is hope with better facilities and education.

katrielalex• 8 years ago

Depends where in the UK! https://www.oxford.gov.uk/info/20074/recycling_advice/25/wha...

IshKebab2• 8 years ago

Still pathetically short. Needs to be at least 10 times longer or give general principles rather than listing items.

For instance it doesn't say if I can recycle nuts and bolts. Rather than just adding that to the list though they could say something like "all items primarily (99% of more) made of metal between 50g and 10kg" or whatever their actual criteria are.

Let me just look around the room and see all the items that list doesn't cover: pewter mugs, large steel ball bearings, vinyl film backing paper, screws, middle bits of sellotape, bike brake cables, empty metal epoxy containers, etc...

bitL• 8 years ago

Facebook internally uses compostable plates and cutlery in their cafeterias; I am wondering if creating those doesn't pollute environment even more than plastics.

Theodores2• 8 years ago

In the canteen I use they wash plates and crockery. Imagine if that practice came to America.

rhapsodic2• 8 years ago

In the canteen I use they wash plates and crockery. Imagine if that practice came to America

American here. What is this "washing of plates and crockery" of which you speak?

maxxxxx4• 8 years ago

I work in the US and it drives me nuts that at work almost everything they use is disposable. They could easily get a dishwasher. Instead every lunch produces a huge pile of trash.

Arnt2• 8 years ago

They are made basically like plastic, except that the process has extra steps at the start, right? Plastic uses plants that grew long ago and stored in underground vaults called "oil fields", whereas the compostable stuff uses plants grown now, grown and processed with effort right now?

In a way, any action in the present pollutes more than an action not taken. But that's hardly a fair comparison.

kazen442• 8 years ago

Also, people heavily underestimate the impact argricultue has on the enviroment.

darken2• 8 years ago

This is where the whole `sustainable` resources concept really tips the scales.

Taking oil out of "underground vaults" is taking long-sequestered CO2 and moving it into the atmosphere/"carbon cycle". It's plastic that has to be dealt with, or CO2 from burning, or it's carbon dissolved in he ocean, etc.

Growing plants takes energy from the sun to condense CO2 into complex higher-energy compounds. This can be converted, with use of (possibly clean) energy into useful goods. If these goods end up being burned, the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere. If buried, the CO2 is (at least temporarily) sequestered.

Either way, there's no net use of carbon. Yes, the input energy could be from carbon fuel sources, but energy will just get cleaner and cleaner until that's no longer necessary. Even the water needed to grow "biodegradable materials" is plentiful given you have the energy.

olyjohn3• 8 years ago

Look closely... they are "commercially compostable" which means heating them to something like 200 degrees for multiple hours. Throw them out in your compost pile or a landfill, and they'll still be there forever, or at least a really long time.

darken2• 8 years ago

I suspect balancing "speed to degrade" with "stability when used" is something that will consistently improve with technology. (Not to mention manufacturing.)

The problem with trash isn't the space it takes up while it breaks down. It's that you're taking all the leftovers from petrochemical processing, making them into disposable products, and them dumping them en-mass into the "biosphere". (I consider a dump effectively the "biosphere" when compared to "a mile under rocks sequestered for millions of years after growing from CO2 with solar power".)

Not only does this mean there's more carbon on the surface, but there's all the gross stuff that came up with the oil that has a tendency of not breaking down in the environment, bio-accumulating, etc. (It didn't break down in the first million years... But stuff that never breaks down is such great packaging!!!)

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

Few years ago Bea Johnson, a French born US citizen, was all in the news on how she's near zero waste

https://frenchly.us/bea-johnson-a-french-woman-on-a-zero-was...

I guess she should get on television asap

mattkrause• 8 years ago

Reusable tampons and condoms (from the article) might be a bridge too far for many people.

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

Ok, the docu I saw about her was mostly about kitchen habits: glass jars, a few tote bags and compost. I'm not pro-reusable condoms either.

dasanman• 8 years ago

Maybe now americans will be more thoughtful

jbob20004• 8 years ago

Gee, where is all this waste coming from? eats take out 3 times a day. I just have no idea how we can get better at recycling. buys a new smartphone every 2 years. Like why do we have to separate plastic and paper? drinks coffee from a disposable cup twice a day. I have no idea how Washington will meet 80% recycling targets! stocks house with consumer packaged goods.

The plastic straw ban was a good start, but I'd like to see some more action on this front. My partner bought a box of crackers the other day and we opened it up to find half the cardboard box was empty and it was just a small plastic bag which itself was half empty. The packaging almost weighed more than the product itself! And I bought a microSD card the other day with a plastic clam shell package that was 15x the size of the product it was holding.

Ridiculous. Consumerism has gone too far. Mandate that packaging can't weigh more than the product it holds and you'd eliminate tons of wasteful packaging. Mandate that all food must be sold in bulk quantities; no more single scoop yogurt cups or snack bags with like 3 gummies in them.

EADGBE3• 8 years ago

There's a warning on the box that says contents may settle during shipment.

As far as having a box too large; well that's just settling for the box maker's specs. (Almost) No one makes their own boxes.

I noticed Amazon starting shipping in frustration-free packaging. I'm quite a fan of that. Assuming it helps (if you compost the cardboard maybe?).

jbob20004• 8 years ago

I wasn't complaining about the lack of product, which is what the warning on the box is for (so people don't call up and say "hey you gave me a half filled bag!"). My complaint is that there is clearly an inefficiency in packaging which is leading to this waste.

And again, my complaint with clam shells isn't that they are frustrating; it's that the product I purchased was far smaller than its packaging, again a huge packaging inefficiency which leads to waste.

I'm not asking companies to make their own boxes or reduce frustration. I'm asking consumers to stop buying shit that comes in boxes and plastic. I didn't need those crackers, we could have happily snacked on homemade bread. Why couldn't the SD card come in a small dime bag in an envelope?

notabee2• 8 years ago

It's almost like capitalism is extraordinarily inefficient at using resources due to perverse incentives caused by only taking local rewards and consequences into account instead of the entire closed planet system, and will simply run to the most lenient local conditions to inefficiently exploit those resources cheaply for profit rather than taking on the expense of becoming more efficient. Imagine that.

grizzles• 8 years ago

It would be hard to find a better fit for a problem needing a ml / robotics solution.

NeedMoreTea5• 8 years ago

I'd like to remind the US of the creation of Keep America Beautiful. I was surprised to discover this was an early piece of corporate greenwashing in the 1950s[0]. Funded by Budweiser, Philip Morris, Coke and others to prevent Vermont bringing a mandatory deposit scheme in for single use packaging. How topical!

Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality. Just by advertising at us to recycle and dispose of our (not that we created or requested it) rubbish carefully.

[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recyc...

RobertRoberts8• 8 years ago

*"Now companies can pollute to their heart's content and make it our failure and their externality."

Not that I disagree with your overall sentiment, but are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?

pkhagah• 8 years ago

It's not just about throwing garbage into trash can. The main question is about how much of garbage is being recycled? And who will pay for the recycling if you mandate 5 different types of garbage and mandate maximum possible recycling? Many of the European countries have major focus on percentage of garbage being recycled. Some countries even reached 70% or so and have plans to increase it even further.

NeedMoreTea5• 8 years ago

Not at all, but human nature being what it is, I would like systemic solutions that personal responsibility can be a constituent part of. Not to discover the body putting out advertisements to keep the place tidy and care for the environment are also a lobby group formed to prevent legislation impacting manufacturers in that area. Makes me wonder about the history of the UK equivalent!

If the trash can't be easily recycled or is excessive that's a manufacturer problem even if it all ends up in the correct bin. If reuse and deposit schemes would help that's a manufacturer or legislative problem. So it goes on. I'd even argue that takeaways and franchises have partial responsibility for trash around their outlets. Produce less, with less impactful materials. After all the customer wanted a burger or coffee not a selection of impossible to recycle junk.

One of those groups is going to some lengths to avoid their responsibilities. The other, on the whole, is trying or is required via kerbside collections from their homes. On windy days kerbside collections in these parts don't pick up all the blown away plastic. That should be their responsibility too. Presumably my local authority didn't specify that adequately in the outsourcing contract - though it shouldn't be necessary.

As is, it looks like we've landed most of the responsibility on those least able to do anything about it.

delecti2• 8 years ago

Consumers have less power to reduce resource usage than companies. When companies put the burden on consumers it's a bit of a farce. There's only so much power the average consumer has to choose brands that are more ecologically friendly.

schiffern7• 8 years ago

are you suggesting that it's not my responsibility to throw garbage into a trash can?

They're suggesting the idea that it's solely the individual's responsibility was invented and promoted (for obvious reasons) by companies that manufacture disposable products, starting in the 1960s.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern... (archive to fix formatting)

Shivetya• 8 years ago

While packaging leads to some pollution problems you only have to see the results of large gatherings in outdoor events and even in some stadiums that America has a problem with people who don't care, don't think its their job, or worse think its cool to trash a place. In many places you just have to look along the side of the road to see the problem. Where I am it is a common use of prisoners to clean up the shoulders.

Children are the best chance of changing it all up. Get them early and emphasize the positives while not dwelling on the negatives. Plus it is always good and sit down and see if we are living up to our own standards. Its one thing to complain on a message board it is another to set an example and hold to it

When it comes to packaging its going to take a combination of consumer pressure and possible regulation. What we must not do is react stupidly like the recent straw bans because when people mock something they don't respect the reasons behind it and it cascades.

NeedMoreTea5• 8 years ago

I think we have to go at all sides.

Young kids are definitely part of the solution. Though by the time they reach teen it often seems any and all interest in tidiness has vanished. They'll usually regain it in some years. :)

Humans of all ages will be lazy and inconsiderate at times. Accept that as a known and cater accordingly. Fewer and benign materials, decomposing harmless materials and systems that encourage consideration like use of deposits on containers. Require more of retailers, manufacturers and event organisers. Once a few bins overflow and it no longer looks that tidy a lot fewer people will care to dispose carefully, etc...

usermac• 8 years ago

This is where capitalism trumps sustainability. A mistake was made.

forkLding2• 8 years ago

Better start educating people about cleaning out their plastic containers before recycling, even a bit of yogurt left at the bottom of a yogurt container can contaminate and can be possibly thrown out as garbage. Heads up to those who didn't know like me.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4606893

polskibus2• 8 years ago

That requires wasting water though. Maybe the container for yoghurt should be changed to be reusable after washing or recyclable without wasting resources on cleaning?

lisper3• 8 years ago

That requires wasting water though

Yeah, this.

This is the thing that most people who consider themselves environmentally conscious do not seem to have taken fully on board: there are no simple solutions here. There is an elephant in the room: there are simply too many human beings on the planet for them all to have a prosperous life style without enormous changes to the fundamental structure of the world's economy. Recycling will not save us. Better gas mileage will not save us. Electric cars will not save us. More public transit will not save us. The only thing that might save us is massive investment in nuclear power (plus solar and wind, but those two alone will not save us) plus a concerted effort to make birth control more widely available and socially acceptable.

RandallBrown• 8 years ago

Wasting water isn't a problem in some parts of the world.

In many places, water you don't use from your tap will just end up flowing into the ocean anyway.

Treating it will require some energy sure, but then it's an energy problem, which is all recycling is (in places like the US where most of our trash ends up safely in landfills and not the ocean.)

danans3• 8 years ago

The amount of additional water needed to wash the yogurt container, compared to the massive amount of water mismanagement in agriculture and industry, is minimal. We learned this during the recent California drought.

The real reason that people (myself included) don't always wash plastic containers out: it's a hassle.

There are several ways we can try to solve this:

- Separating recycling materials at the curb, so the yogurt container never meets the clean paper (although I thought Canada already does this).

- Biodegradable plant-based plastics suitable for food packaging purposes

- Better automated sorting technology at the recycling center.

danans3• 8 years ago

"Even a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left in a jar can contaminate a tonne of paper and make it unmarketable — destined for the dump. Same for that glob of yogurt left in the bottom of the container."

The article seems to claim that the yogurt can contaminate clean paper that is mixed in, making the paper un-recyclable, not the plastic yogurt container itself.

Also, this appears to be a new thing, since China stopped accepting contaminated paper for recycling.

mjevans• 8 years ago

Unless it is a LARGE, clean, never touched food item like a box the paper should probably actually just go in to the compost stream anyway...

I would actually welcome a far more limited* (and to recyclable types) number of plastics allowed in packaging and requirements that they also cannot be fused to other materials. The numbers should be REQUIRED to be /raised/ or /impressed/ to a large degree and be VERY LARGE on the two dimensional face as well. A 'nearly legally blind' person should be able to still tell where the logo is and understand it's content.

The plastics / glasses binning should also assume they /are/ getting dirty consumer content and use an 'industrial' boiling water pot to dislodge and release the food waste. Such a processing step is more practical as part of the post-consumer input filter.

makecheck• 8 years ago

When I was a kid, the “bottle depot” was a very motivating way to go out of one’s way to collect stray bottles.

Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).

nojvek• 8 years ago

This * 1000. The way things work nowadays is the supermarket chain doesn’t pay the cost of polluting the planet.

Every goddamn product is planed obsoletion so it can be cheap with a fat price margin and the customer has to keep on buying every couple of years.

Charge supermarkets for plastics and pay customers to return recyclable things and that’s a huge motivator to reduce landfill garbage in half.

I’m also a big believer that we need better robotics. When I saw Wall-E I just got super excited by seeing trash recycling robots.

Robots should be doing stuff humans don’t do, not replacing them. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game.

JimboOmega• 8 years ago

There are already some pretty impressive recycling robots, especially in the field of sorting out mixed recyclables (scanning the incoming stream and shooting stuff that matches certain parameters into a separate area). It's pretty cool, you should check it out. I don't know how economical they are but they still require human backup because of the sheer variety of (incorrect) crap put in recycling bins.

You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans?

Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense.

Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.

notabee2• 8 years ago

The issue is energy. Energy to build the robots, energy to power their efforts. Both the power and the plastics come from the same finite fossil fuel resources and will get ever more expensive as extracting that resource gets more expensive. To tackle the recycling problem we have to tackle the energy problem or we'll make no progress addressing the essential cost. The only viable thing to do otherwise is reduce plastic production and use.

keeganjw• 8 years ago

This is definitely a great way to get people to recycle but I think the problem here is that because recycling companies can't send plastics and paper to China they don't have anywhere to sell the recycling to be reused. Not enough companies are buying it to make new products

mgbmtl5• 8 years ago

That's often because the recycled materials are of low quality, due to lack of sorting.

ProAm• 8 years ago

Someone still has to recycle it (which isnt really happening in the US) and then they need to sell it for more than they are paying with the deposit return. This is probably not going to be worth the effort in the US. China was our go to affordable recycling partner, and now they have found to not be profitable enough to be worth it.

lacker4• 8 years ago

The problem isn't that people aren't recycling enough. The problem is that recycling is now more expensive than landfills, because it is not producing valuable enough material. If we encourage more people to recycle, it will just cost even more.

blablabla1232• 8 years ago

It depends Where you live, in a lot of countries/regions neither separated waste bins nor products from recycled material are available. In Germany Both is present, making the process much more ready and economic than in the U.S. I wished though that more People would support this System, both in countries Where it’s facilitated but also in countries that have no central System for that in place.

dmortin2• 8 years ago

I wonder if PET bottles could be reusable if not crushed. If they are still usable then they would just wash them in the factory and fill them again.

Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.

vinbreau• 8 years ago

Grew up in a rural area. 45 minute drive to nearest recycling center. My father would collect an entire truck load of bagged recyclables and bring it there. He would walk away with maybe 5$ if he was lucky.

5$ to bring 15 bags 45 minutes away... I don't see an incentive here for people who live in rural areas, which is quite a lot of people.

blablabla1232• 8 years ago

Germany: 45 second Walk down the stairs for separate Paper, Glass, plastic/foil and bio waste bins - Even in rural areas sometimes to this extend.

Johnny555• 8 years ago

I took an entire truck load of household trash (cleaned out a house after tenants moved out), and it cost me $40 to dump it at the trash transfer station.

Landfill space isn't free, so by diverting trash to recycling, your dad saved more than $5.

megaman22• 8 years ago

A nickel bottle deposit was a lot more incentive to bother with collecting bottles and cans when you could get a coke for a quarter, than now when you need to trade in grocery bag full.

I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.

bluedino• 8 years ago

It's still 10 cents in Michigan

zaroth2• 8 years ago

I’d like to see the deposit required be calculated based in part on the length of the warranty. The longer the warranty, the smaller the recycling deposit.

If you want to sell a refrigerator with a 1 year warranty then it’s going to carry a $200 recycling deposit. Once you get to a 15 year, all parts (not just compressor), transferable warranty, the deposit can go to $0.

The sheer amount of cheap shit that’s built to simply self destruct in a year or two when it could — for 25% more cost — last 10x as long, that’s what drives me crazy.

It works out to be a regressive tax but appliances should last a lifetime not a couple years before breaking in a way where it’s cheaper to replace than repair. But since the durability is hidden information from the buyer, the market races to the bottom as long as durability is correlated with cost.

andrewksl• 8 years ago

I like that idea, but I suspect the big stuff is actually pretty easy to recycle. It's the little bits of plastic and paper that are a problem to sort.

bluGill2• 8 years ago

Some states do have a deposit. What it really does is ensure that people don't drink generic pop. The people who would recycle anyway recycle, and find it more convenient. The people who wouldn't don't recycle.

I'm probably being overly cynical above, but much.

gonvaled• 8 years ago

In Germany no beer bottle is discarded. It has .08€ deposit. Around bars, those bottles left on the street are collected by people with bags, or whatever. Bottles bought in the supermarket are cleaned, kept and returned.

I don't know the numbers, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of bottles are discarded.

The same applies for plastic bottles (0.25€)

Atreus• 8 years ago

This shows an externality - that "Recycling" was really just a sham. Actual recycling has a cost overhead.

I think this is a good thing. I think it will drive to actual recycling that does actual good, instead of, as China realistically called it "moving trash".

craftyguy4• 8 years ago

I think it will drive to actual recycling that does actual good

I'm not so sure, at least in the US. Politicians almost always follow the path of least resistance when dealing with problems (our current system encourages it), and the shortest, least resistant path to making this problem disappear is to pay some other country to take it and do what they want with it (burn it, bury it, etc).

delecti2• 8 years ago

is to pay some other country to take it

They tried that though. There's currently no "other country" willing to take it. That was Plan A, and it failed, it seems that Plan B is to just let it build up, but that won't last forever either.

rapnie• 8 years ago

Hopeful news is that some really efficient recycling technologies for mixed plastics are under development, like Magnetic Density Separation (MDS)

https://www.tudelft.nl/en/ceg/research/stories-of-science/re...

jobu• 8 years ago

Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling.

What I remember is that most people feel bad about throwing stuff away, so a big part of the recycling movement is based around guilt rather than facts. The slogan "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is in that order for a reason. Reducing the amount of what you use and reusing what you have is much more important and effective in helping the environment than recycling. Also putting things in a landfill really isn't really a problem. Landfills don't take up a significant amount of space, and when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment.

As for the economics of recycling:

* Recycling paper is a terrible idea. It takes a lot more chemicals, fuel and labor to recycle paper than produce new paper from trees (and it's a much lower quality product). Also, landfills are able to capture and sell the methane produced from paper as it decomposes, so it makes a lot more economical and environmental sense to just throw it away.

* Recycling glass can be economical depending on the cost of natural gas because the melting point of glass is slightly lower than raw silica. Unfortunately recycling adds cost because of the sorting and cleaning.

* Some plastics can't be made from recycled materials, and even when they can be, the economics of it depends on the cost of crude oil and natural gas. Prices for gas and oil fluctuate a lot, so it's risky for companies to be in the business of processing plastic back into feedstock because they don't know whether they will be able to sell it at or above cost at the time they're buying materials.

* Aluminum is really the only commonly recycled material that makes 100% economic sense. It's really expensive to produce from ore, and cheap produce from recycled materials.

EDIT: Found the episode here - https://www.bitchute.com/video/j0Hd6UfA4MKo/

dv_dt2• 8 years ago

Some of these claims seem extraordinary, e.g. some casual googling seems to indicate that recycling paper is less chemical and energy intensive than new pulp... so do you have some specific research that supports these ideas, or does it all come from the P&T episode?

sandworm101• 8 years ago

Ya, there are too many factors. Turning a pile of very ink-heavy newspapers into crisp white photocopier paper takes lots of chemicals. Turning it back into a 50% content for more newsprint isn't as much of a problem.

cwkoss• 8 years ago

That episode came out ~ a decade ago, wouldn't be surprised if technological advances have changed the economics of paper recycling.

eugeniub• 8 years ago

when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment.

That's a bold statement I would love to see some sources for.

mrfredward• 8 years ago

Also, landfills are able to capture and sell the methane produced from paper as it decomposes, so it makes a lot more economical and environmental sense to just throw it away.

The price of natural gas has plummeted due to fracking. So much so, that nowadays it is often more economical for drillers to burn the methane off than to build the infrastructure to sell it. I expect the same economics apply to landfills. Plus, methane is 25x as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas (hence why it is better to burn methane than release it), so if capturing methane from landfills is at all less than perfect, decomposing paper products are still a significant environmental liability, not to mention an explosion risk. And that's just for paper, one of the most benign things you can throw away...

ryacko• 8 years ago

That has always been true. The incentive to capture methane never has been particularly high, given that transporting a gas is much more difficult than a bunch of unrefined liquids.

philipodonnell2• 8 years ago

Prices for gas and oil fluctuate a lot, so it's risky for companies to be in the business of processing plastic back into feedstock because they don't know whether they will be able to sell it at or above cost at the time they're buying materials.

This is true in lots of industries that use hedging to control their exposure to commodity prices, why wouldn't that be true here?

sonnyblarney• 8 years ago

Paper only doesn't make sense to recycle if you externalize a lot of the costs.

For example, what if we had to pay to put something in the garbage ... as we ultimately pay China?

Then the equilibrium in the equation changes ...

slavik81• 8 years ago

I find it hard to believe the parent was failing to account for the cost of the landfill. It's the most obvious cost of that strategy, so it would be hard to miss.

On a related topic, to know that the equilibrium changes, you'd need to know the difference in cost before and after accounting for the thing you added.

This discussion would benefit significantly from careful analysis using actual numbers. If there's one thing that Bullshit! got right, it's that there are clear, empirical metrics we can use to evaluate solutions, and we should use them.

lacker4• 8 years ago

I don't know where you live, but here in California I do pay for garbage services.

JTbane• 8 years ago

It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that.

But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Or worse, tossing it into the ocean.

HillaryBriss5• 8 years ago

worse, tossing it into the ocean

I used to think that. Then I read this and now I'm less sure:

....the most widely-used plastic, the stuff used to make shopping bags, is the one that produces the greatest amount of these warming gases ... after 212 days in the sun, this plastic emitted 176 times more methane than at the start of the experiment. Ironically, when plastics were exposed to air the amount of methane emitted was double the level from sea water.

more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989

ryanmercer6• 8 years ago

It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years.

Plastics are basically forever. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and contaminate the environment (they've found commercially sold sea salt contaminated with micro-plastics).

With the exception of the plastics that are biodegradable (expensive and extremely uncommon) and the ones that we've discovered worms can eat.

zerb3• 8 years ago

I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.

nordsieck• 8 years ago

how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum

I doubt they care about anything on the aluminum at all. If you watch videos of people melting down soda cans into aluminum ingots [0], there is a lot of dross or non-aluminum material that needs to be removed. Since there is already a process in place to eliminate non-aluminum material, I wouldn't worry about a bit of food.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA

jimrandomh2• 8 years ago

If it can be cleaned off by a kitchen sink, it can definitely be cleaned off by an industrial recycling facility.

igivanov• 8 years ago

glass

In the good old USSR there was a limited number of sizes/styles of glass bottles and jars in circulation. Each one had a deposit value, and if it had no cracks/chips and all labels were removed, it could be returned for direct reuse, i.e. no melting and further manufacturing was involved. I think it worked OK since it had existed for many decades, and energy was cheap in those days.

HillaryBriss5• 8 years ago

IIRC, that is also how they handle half liter beer bottles in places like Germany and Netherlands. As an American, I saw it and thought "Wow. That just makes so much sense. Why don't we do that?"

city41• 8 years ago

Small dairies in the US do this. Our milk comes in glass bottles and we return them for reuse. I've always hoped this would catch on more.

tasty_freeze• 8 years ago

Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling.

I watched that episode and it was hardly a decent job. Penn is a staunch libertarian and that colors his presentation of the facts. Also, it is an entertainment show so they love to have something to yell "bullshit" at. There is no nuance.

For sure, in the zeal to increase recycling percentage, it was a huge mistake for cities which used to collect sorted recyclables to have a "single stream" recycling flow to make it easier for people to "recycle". No argument there.

Something that shouldn't be discounted is that it seems like a relatively simple problem to have NN image classifiers to sort the stream of waste. It doesn't need to be 99% accurate at all -- it is better that it can classify 90% of the items with near 100% accuracy and just throw away the 10% it isn't sure about, resulting in more pure recycling streams.

jinushaun• 8 years ago

What bothers me is melting a glass bottle of wine to produce a new glass bottle of wine. Just remove the label and refill the same bottle with different wine! Recycling should be the last resort.

jesseb• 8 years ago

I've seen a few microbreweries re-using bottles lately, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Gives them a bit of character as a bonus too, lots will have scuffs and other markings on them from previous use/transport.

rficcaglia• 8 years ago

This.

In Greece, Italy and Spain (likely elsewhere but these I have seen first hand, and never in the US of A) there are corner markets that sell very good wine from big barrels or stainless steel vats. you can buy or bring your own reusable containers, glass or plastic or whatever.

the problem is too much packaging of any kind. Buy small and local. Much more sustainable.

baq2• 8 years ago

Are you taking about dollar expensive or Joule expensive? You can easily tweak ROI as a regulator by taxing but EORI is technology and physics limited.

pandasun2• 8 years ago

What would happen if we put trash in shipping containers and launch it into space? (Serious question).

ryanmercer6• 8 years ago

Your garbage bill would could you about 10,000 USD per pound and require the use of obscene amounts of rocket fuel.

pandasun2• 8 years ago

Thank you for explaining.

Kluny• 8 years ago

I'm going to be pursuing a degree in Environmental Management with a specialty in Waste Management in Denmark next year. Really excited to be stepping away from software development and into this exciting and growing field :D

satokema• 8 years ago

For an entertaining introduction (and some perspective) on the whole process of trash collection and recycling, I recommend _Trashed_ by Backderf. It's an eye-opener.

Possibly a little exaggerated in parts, but just the basic farts are insane: all that stands between the gunk in the landfill and the soil system is a thin layer of plastic, usually.

vondur• 8 years ago

Can we not burn our trash like some of the Nordic countries currently do? Or would the EPA frown on something like that?

ryanmercer6• 8 years ago

Even if we could, you're talking about a few hundred million tons of trash each year.

mirimir3• 8 years ago

This is just so bloody predictable. Recycling isn't a new thing. It's been common "forever" to recycle paper and metals. But you had to keep stuff separate: steel, copper, brass, newspaper, bond paper, etc.

But to increase participation in modern consumer society, commingled "recycling" became the norm. And it just doesn't work. Broken glass makes paper useless, because it damages machines. And once commingled recyclables go through the collection process, with crushing and shearing, separation becomes virtually impossible.

Anyway, the only hope is source separation. And that's problematic. Because most people don't want to bother. And because there are just too many categories. Too many kinds of plastics. Packaging with multiple layers, including paper, metal and plastic.

samstave3• 8 years ago

The real point I always see when looking at the problem is Packaging.

Packaging should be required to be as literally minimal as actually possible, consuming the least amount of resources in every phase of the lifecycle as possible.

Excessive packaging should be as illegal as it is immoral and anti-environmental.

Inks, Paper, Plastic, Wraps, Ties, ALL of it should be as eliminated as possible.

Think of the time, energy, resources (power, fuel, transport, machinery, engineering etc) all that has been put into the creation of waste.

mirimir3• 8 years ago

I agree. Also, options for material usage ought to be limited. And one could require that every manufacturer accept return of all packaging. I'm old enough to remember when milk, beer and soda bottles were typically returned, washed and reused. The last time I lived in Mexico, that was still common, at least in some markets.

But the other side of it is that modern packaging arguably reduces waste. Or at least, I've read that. Maybe it's BS.

philipodonnell2• 8 years ago

Packaging should be required to be as literally minimal as actually possible

It would be interesting to approach this as requiring all elements of a product not intended to be used as a part of the product to be composed of materials which all fall within the came category of recyclables so that they do not have to be separated.

jimrandomh2• 8 years ago

That would be extremely wasteful. That packaging is there for a reason; it prevents items from getting damaged. If you remove the packaging from 1000 items and one of them breaks, you've wasted a lot of resources on net, because most packaging is very cheap compared to the items inside.

zerb3• 8 years ago

I'm wondering how possible it would be to have garbage trucks identify valuable materials in trash as they enter the truck, so the city can fine someone who doesn't separate.

milesvp• 8 years ago

Good luck enforcing these kinds of things. States like Washington have constitutional privacy protections that extend to curb side garbage collection. The state, or an actor working on behalf of the state, can't look through your garbage. I know a number of lawyers here who are waiting with baited breath for the wrong person to get fined based on what's in/not in their garbage in Seattle.

nitwit005• 8 years ago

Because most people don't want to bother.

That ends up being the only thing that matters. We have separate bins here. Just look inside and you'll see most people ignore it and treat it as 3 trash cans.

krsdcbl• 8 years ago

These comments are the first thing that made me realize the US has one "recycleables" bin and everything recyclable is dumped in there.

And it doesn't sound like a smart idea, i mean how the ...

I'm a little lost for words.

carapace• 8 years ago

I've been steadily working towards trash collecting robots for several years now, ever since hearing about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After the initial shock wore off I thought to myself, "hey, free resources."

The initial challenge was finding a secure OS to run on the robots so they wouldn't be suborned into a (physical) botnet. That proved challenging, as the only way you can trust your system is to prove it correct from the metal up. In order to be able to trust the proof you have to be able to understand symbolic logic. It turns out there's a simple notation that makes this easy[1] and which makes for a simple SAT solver. Combined with a logical-paradigm reasoning engine (i.e. Prolog or miniKanren or Coq, etc... There are a few to choose from these days) you can describe and compile e.g. a trustworthy OS and application code for a swarm robot distributed over the ocean. (I'm just at that point now. It's been slow going, I lead a chaotic life.)

In the meantime the NN/ML renaissance hit and now a lot of what would have been hairy problems are already solved. I had thought to have some sort of volunteer "Mechanical Turk" network of humans to help sort the trash, but very effective sorting machines have become available in just the last few years.

There are (at least) two major method of recycling plastic: Thermal depolymerization[2] which uses heat and pressure to turn it back into a kind of oil-like slurry; and Molten Salt Oxidation[3] which oxidizes (burns) molecules (not just plastic) within a red-hot bath of molten salt. This latter process can handle pretty much anything, it's used to dispose of munitions including chemical weapons. It's also exothermic, you can get power out. It also makes a good atomic reactor.

There's another option that could be called "divide and conquer". What makes something a piece of "trash" rather than a building material? Uniformity of shape and material. Consider the "timbrel vault"[4]. The basic idea is to subdivide a piece of trash until it's more-or-less "pure" (glass, paper, plastic, whatever), record the shapes of the individual pieces, and then assemble them (by machine) into larger structures and glue them together. Because you would have precise control over the fine structure of the composite material output you could build non-linear structures (i.e. that bend or compress in one direction but are stiff in others, etc.) or reinforce weaker or more brittle materials with stronger bits.

All this to say: "waste" is another word for "resource". Change your perspective and you change your level of wealth. And it's getting exponentially cheaper and easier to apply automated intelligence to rearrange the "waste" into useful forms! From this POV, China has done US a favor.

[1] "Laws of Form" G. Spencer-Brown. Cf. "Markable Mark" G. Burnett-Stuart.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

[3] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/home.earthlink.net/b...

[4] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/11/tiles-vaults.html

Endama• 8 years ago

Isn't there an argument here to build more incinerator-style power plants to manage the garbage buildup (esp. in urban centers?) To my knowledge, lots of European/Asian developed nations are already doing this with acceptable (i.e. low) environmental impact.

Can someone more knowledgable comment on this?

take_5• 8 years ago

I'd love to see Amazon push for its suppliers to offer a low environmental impact packaging option. If you buy a camera on Amazon, the box isn't selling anything on Amazon, so you can use a basic recycled board box with minimal to no plastic for your new camera. Would select that option every time. I have opened my MacBook box since removing it from the box the first time. It may as well have been made out of lowest energy to produce and recycle material or something naturally biodegradable.

Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling

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