What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. Recycling

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

by edward • 7 years ago

256 219 7 years ago

theatlantic.com

xattt• 7 years ago

I too heard the 99PI episode that cited this article.

doytch• 7 years ago

Not only is your snark unnecessary, this article came out March 5 - after that episode.

Simulacra• 7 years ago

Maybe this is a blessing in disguise so we're focused more on recycling from the start, not as an after-the-fact. Companies like Apple (and others) have been inching us towards this notion of disposable electronics. Once we can no longer simply "dispose" of things, perhaps it will push companies and governments to look at making things more environmentally responsible from the start.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

It could be a blessing in disguise if recycling is considered appropriately. Reduce, reuse, recycle, dispose, in that order of priority.

Without that it is very difficult to claim, with any credibility at all, being environmentally responsible.

I'm not optimistic.

zikzak• 7 years ago

My mother, in her 80s, occasionally says they didn't need recycling when she was young because things were not disposable in the same way they are now. They were also pretty broke and so much more likely to "make do" than they were to buy something new. The lack of choice and diversity of goods back then probably also played a huge role in this. Not saying we should go back to that but we can learn from it.

pertymcpert• 7 years ago

Perhaps Apple not the best example there.

mostlyjason• 7 years ago

No one cares because the perceived cost is zero. Burning your recycling just externalizes the cost to the environment. If I lived in one of those cities, I’d encourage the city to increase disposal fees so they can do it properly. If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners. If business can earn more profit or increase volume by using better packaging, then they’ll do so.

BoorishBears2• 7 years ago

If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners

That just punishes the low income people again.

Taxes on goods disproportionately affect poor people because the tax is a larger portion of your purchasing power the lower your income is.

A rich person, or even a middle class person, isn’t going to be put out of their habits by a couple of cents.

barrkel2• 7 years ago

The tax should still be on the purchase price. If essential goods end up too expensive for poor people, then the answer is to raise income levels for poor people via some kind of redistribution.

In order to solve the problem systematically, incentives need to be aligned so that desired global collective outcomes emerge from local individual choices.

If the cost isn't on the purchase price, there's little incentive on consumers at the point of purchase to choose a product with a cheaper disposal cost. Disposal is geographically and temporally remote; and if you're poor, you can economize on it by cheating (littering, fly tipping, illegal burning, man with a van who takes the problem off your hands, etc).

coldtea4• 7 years ago

And because the percentage of income one spends for "packaged products" is gets lower the richer you get (and gets capped), the rich can just put aside a "pollute as much as I like" percentage of their income just for not having to care about recycling.

skybrian4• 7 years ago

This is a general-purpose argument against charging for anything. Someone won't be able to afford it, so we should make everything free, right? Anytime you charge everyone the same price it'd going to be regressive, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have prices, because prices are what prevents overconsumption and shortages.

The key is that the money from charging for "sin taxes" needs to be given back in a way that's progressive. Either give everyone the same amount or overweight giving the money to poor people.

(Price discrimination also helps; often you can figure out how to charge more for people that can afford it.)

ryandrake• 7 years ago

Why should consumers pay those fees or taxes? Businesses ultimately cause the problem by producing disposable goods, and should bear the cost of disposing their goods, not consumers. Charge manufacturers per-product based on how much of a cost/environmental impact it is to dispose of that product (and packaging!). Something like a 1¢/gram of plastic produced, charged to manufacturers, could make it more painful to produce wasteful products like bottled water and Keurig cups.

dlhavema• 7 years ago

But those costs will be passed onto whoever's buys their bulk products, who will then un turn pass the cost down to the end of the chain - consumers. It just makes everything cost more for end users still.

wereHamster• 7 years ago

Businesses ultimately cause the problem by producing disposable goods

People cause the problem by buying disposable goods. No business will produce something that nobody buys…

michaelbuckbee• 7 years ago

The article doesn't mention Plastic China [1] the documentary that in some ways really prompted China to make this change.

1 - https://www.plasticchina.org/

unfunco• 7 years ago

"They can split the atom, but they can't recycle plastic?"

I think this was a quote from that documentary, it was either posted here or on reddit previously (I'm not complaining, it was fascinating) – that quote, by a worker in a Chinese recycling plant to the owner of the plant, after being told Americans can't handle plastic, has stuck with me for some reason.

sykho• 7 years ago

Thanks for the link. This is the first time I’ve heard about this film. The trailer and reading about the film are sad and depressing. I’ll try to watch the film.

My impression is that China is making huge investments in cleaning up the country. Increasingly China has begun to assert itself and not allowing itself to be a dumping ground goes along with this change.

pfdietz5• 7 years ago

It's important to understand the issue that recycling is meant to address. It's cost of landfills, not shortage of materials.

The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering.

So, I can see two solutions:

(1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order.

(2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.

skept• 7 years ago

For (2) the tax should also be based on the biodegradability of the materials.

dylan6043• 7 years ago

biodegradability of individual items is less of an impact when the majority of trash is disposed in non-degrading plastic trash bags.

pjc50• 7 years ago

(1) I think waste-to-energy is underappreciated, especially if a certain elasticity is planned rather than just running the turbines 24/7 it can meet the elasticity needs of the electric grid.

But then you have to process the ash: https://www.thisiseco.co.uk/news_and_blog/what-happens-to-wa...

(2) is roughly the Green Dot or WEEE approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)

Thlom• 7 years ago

In my town general waste is burned and the resulting heat is used to heat buildings.

benj111• 7 years ago

I don't per se have a problem with waste to energy.

I do have a problem labeling it as green energy, and it should be the option of last resort after all other recycling options have been exhausted.

daxfohl2• 7 years ago

So basically the argument I had with my dad (conservative blue collar) a couple years ago when he argued "No we're not going to pay $2/mo for recycling bins, this whole recycling thing is just a scam for the trash companies to skim money." Me: "Blah blah blah rainforests, blah blah blah manufacturing waste to produce, etc." I guess he was right?

pfdietz5• 7 years ago

He was sort of right. He correctly sensed there was something off about the sanctimonious arguments for recycling. But it's not the trash companies who are to blame.

rasz• 7 years ago

I live in a capital of an EU country. City mandates recycle bins and garbage segregation due to EU laws, same City collects trash from all bins using same trucks and proceeds to dump it all in one big hole in the ground ~100km away while paying hefty fines. Its been like this ever since we got recycle bins.

zanny• 7 years ago

Why would you rent recycling bins? I use old 5 gallon paint buckets where I live that I just painted the color coding on and my recyclers don't care.

The thing with recycling is there are mountains of externalities to whether it makes sense or not way beyond just the question of if recycling itself is profitable, the most profound of which just being the carrying cost of consuming so much space with landfills, especially in areas of higher population density - you have more trash per unit area but have to carry that trash farther to get it away from the density. In those environments local recycling centers can be much more economically viable.

henrikschroder• 7 years ago

"Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order."

Yeah, it's not invented in America, so it obviously doesn't exist.

Listen, there are countries with almost no landfills because everything is incinerated. Heck, there are even US states without landfills because everything is incinerated! This is not a "tall order", trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.

chabes• 7 years ago

“trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.”

While these plants may be efficient at reclaiming energy, there are other factors to consider.

From the article: “And while many incineration facilities bill themselves as “waste to energy” plants, studies have found that they release more harmful chemicals, such as mercury and lead, into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants”

jeffrallen• 7 years ago

Efficient incineration requires dry, energy dense garbage. Thus you need a population that recycles paper, PET, glass and compost religiously, so that all that is left to burn are hydrocarbons like plastic.

If Americans "are terrible at recycling" as the article says, then the incinerators will be burning the wrong stuff.

daxfohl2• 7 years ago

So does this mean that recycling is not necessarily even a net gain for the environment? It's all just because it is (was) cheaper?

I mean, if it's really not having an impact on e.g. rainforests etc, and adds the environmental toll of all the petroleum used to ship it all back overseas and the recycling process, might it even be a net loss for the environment?

maroonedanchor• 7 years ago

Part of it was to legitimize producing it in the first place. Plastic bottle production does not seem so bad when the new evil is throwing it away vs. recycling. We shifted the onerous onto ourselves instead of the producers.

bickfordb• 7 years ago

Landfills are actually pretty cheap, which I think is part of the problem. If I take debris directly to my local transfer station (Portland, OR) they charge a mere $30/ton.

thereisnospork• 7 years ago

Why is that a problem? The answer to the question "what is the best[1] way to package milk", for instance, might in fact be one time use plastics that are then buried for the next million years.

[1] most economical, accounting for externalities

pfdietz5• 7 years ago

Is that figure subsidized? Landfill disposal often is, to reduce the incentive for illegal dumping.

ape4• 7 years ago

Got the robots on it

qrbLPHiKpiux• 7 years ago

We consume too much. Driving out of my development on trash day shows me this. Bags and bags, boxes, loads of trash for a home of 4 people. Two adults, two children. I wonder what they’re going through?

convolvatron• 7 years ago

its almost as if the invisible hand is encouraging us to be wasteful, to encourage growth, rather than efficient as we were all taught in primary school.

zeroname• 7 years ago

Just dump all the sorted garbage in sorted landfills. Recycling may become economical again at some point. In any event, future technology will deal with it better.

jrochkind1• 7 years ago

I assume you are joking, but I liked the joke. (If it's not a joke, it's horrifying).

thekingofh• 7 years ago

The whole point was that we were supposed to be recycling, not using more fossil fuels to ship it all back overseas to be possibly just burned or buried anyways. And at best the recycled material is shipped yet again overseas back to us in the form of new products. The best thing that's come from all this is that we finally know what actually happens to all that 'recycled' material.

hahajk• 7 years ago

My understanding was that our trade deficit with China meant that we had to send more shipping containers back to China and we filled them with relatively light recycling waste instead of simply sending them back empty. It was basically free transportation.

But maybe that’s not be true.

pstuart• 7 years ago

There is hope for being able to recycle most plastic: https://purecycletech.com/

jonplackett• 7 years ago

So basically, recycling is a lie. Most stuff can’t really be recycled except at great cost. Who perpetuated this lie to begin with I wonder, was it just to get us to keep buying stuff?

influx• 7 years ago

Yes, other than aluminum, it has been debunked for some time:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6klo0p

It’s so religious that most people won’t even consider a debate about it. Anyone speaking out against it is a heretic.

afpx• 7 years ago

Some of us do it out of principle. I have no disillusions about its impact. For all the plastic I recycle, I know there’s an invisible supply chain of waste that makes my actions almost meaningless. Yet, I do it anyway, because it’s a good reminder of the values that I don’t want to forget.

Dylan168072• 7 years ago

Speaking out against what, specifically? You can complain about the problems with the current system without anyone looking at you weirdly. Only if you conclude "therefore we should stop trying to recycle these things" will anyone complain. The system could be fixed, if we put effort into it.

HillaryBriss6• 7 years ago

I would like to know if there is any progress to be made in just "stabilizing" plastics in large quantities.

Is it a worthwhile research goal to find a cheap method of transforming post-consumer plastics into an inert, large-scale form (the size of a tractor trailer) that is long-term stable and doesn't offgas?

Is reusability really necessary?

behindmyscreen3• 7 years ago

It’s probably better to figure out how to convert it to concrete stabilization materials.

amanaplanacanal2• 7 years ago

I wonder about this too. It would be a form of carbon capture, even though it is probably a tiny percentage.

lostapathy4• 7 years ago

Not exactly what you're asking for, but similar goals: https://preciousplastic.com/

behindmyscreen3• 7 years ago

People who saw a way to skim off the top by setting up recycling companies.

ip263• 7 years ago

The article itself pointed out that 1) it didn't used to be a lie and 2) it's only a lie because we throw so much trash into the recycling stream.

So if anything is a lie, it's single stream recycling.

Gpetrium• 7 years ago

I would argue that recycling itself is not a lie, it just so happen that at some point people discovered it was cheaper to ship their problem to someone else.

I would argue that the 'recycling' teachings serves as a way to teach kids & parents to care about their environment. Composting is also a type of 'recycling' that allows you to make better use of a portion of the garbage you make.

blackflame7000• 7 years ago

It was inncidents like the 1987 Mobro 4000 trash barge that created the headline that we were running out of landfill space and everyone needed to start recycling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000

There was even a simpsons episode where homer manages the local dump that becomes filled to capacity

barrkel2• 7 years ago

The garbage disposal problem, of which recycling is a subset, is due to a lack of back pressure in the consumption system.

From the perspective of production, disposal is an externality. From the perspective of the consumer, disposal is an annoyance that they typically don't have enough buyer power individually to push back on to producers.

Society has come up one workaround: social conscience, the green movement, so that shame can be used to attack brands, aggregating buying power to push back on producers. It doesn't work brilliantly with everyone - some people are allergic to the ritualistic, moralizing pseudo-religious aspects of the movement.

Politics has come up with another: WEEE: the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This is an attempt to tax goods by incorporating the cost of disposal into the purchase price. While the green movement was necessary to provide political will, it's much better than a directly shaming approach - the closer the cost of disposal can be pushed to the producer, tightening the feedback loop, the more likely economic incentives will work.

Continuing to push the problem upstream into production is the long term answer. If you try and increase costs at point of disposal, consumers are simply incentivized to cheat, or pay people to cheat on their behalf. The whole exporting of rubbish to China wheeze was one big cheat. The costs have to be loaded at the point of purchase, and producers ultimately made responsible for costs of disposal.

Areading314• 7 years ago

I find that Amazon is one of the worst offenders. It's clear, especially for Amazon fresh orders, that they have zero incentive to care about their plastic footprint, and they take full advantage of this. Should be taxed or disincentivized.

pault• 7 years ago

Ugh, I once got an amazon package that contained a product about the size of a toaster oven and it was shipped in the original manufacturer's box, nested in the box from whoever shipped the product to amazon, nested in the box amazon used to ship it. All the boxes were full of packing foam of course, so the total volume of the packaging after removing it was about a meter squared, or about 25x the volume of the product inside. It was extremely upsetting.

consp• 7 years ago

As an example for recycling: the grocery deliverable service I use (picnic) charges 35 ct as a deposit for the plastic bags which gets refunded if you give them back the next delivery. They are bio decomposable but they want them back anyways.

caoilte2• 7 years ago

Good answer.

One interesting addendum is that many food producers are lobbying to argue that reducing the amount of plastic in their packages will likely lead to more food wastage.

The feedback loops here are fascinating, but I'm increasingly reminded of the scorched earth public relations tactics employed by the Tobacco industry against plain packaging and which turned out later to be pure fiction.

https://www.bath.ac.uk/case-studies/debunking-big-tobaccos-a...

ip263• 7 years ago

The precept that packaging serves to reduce spoilage is true.

The real question is, can there really be no other alternative with merit? For example, it's true glass can break, but the main knocks against it are mostly cost & weight (aka delivery cost). Are they lobbying in good faith, or just trying to keep the cheapest option?

sjwright• 7 years ago

Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. Increased food wastage is a problem with entirely short-term consequences, and the opportunity to save this wasted food will spur new innovations.

We're capable of shipping eggs very well in low grade recycled paper; there are surely ecological solutions for other foods to be found.

mirimir8• 7 years ago

Yes!

And it's not just economic costs. It's "lifestyle", more or less. So a few decades ago, all beer bottles were the same size and shape. You took your empties back to the store, and got paid for them. Distributors bought them from stores, and manufacturers from distributors. So they got reused until they broke.

Maybe 40 years ago, some regional US beer makers still did this. Maybe some still do. I saw this 10-20 years ago in Mexico, for both beer and soda bottles. And it was also pretty common for wine bottles.

But now? Now my wife buys French yogurt in tiny glass bottles. Tiny heavy glass bottles. We could save them, but they're really too small for anything but liquor. And who wants to drink from old yogurt containers, in any case?

in the late 60s and 70s, a crucial aspect of the food coop movement was buying bulk stuff, and using your own containers. In Mexico, old-style milk stores often didn't provide containers. And if they did, it was plastic bags. Handling a 2L plastic bag of milk is quite the experience.

I can't imagine how the US could go back to bulk distribution and reusable containers. Or, for that matter, how we could undo suburbanization. But there are limits to externalities, and we are hitting them.

tomc1985• 7 years ago

Still common in South America (as of 5 years ago) and Europe (as of about 9)

ams61102• 7 years ago

Reusable containers died as soon as plastic containers were developed. Plastic containers are so much lighter that significant money is saved in transport, and obviously the handling and transport for the returns, the inspecting, washing, sterilizing costs are all gone. Huge win for the producers, not sure whether it's a net win or loss overall environmentally.

nostrademons4• 7 years ago

Starting to catch on again in the Bay Area. Mason jars have been all the rage for a while now (for everything - yogurt, soda, beer, kombucha, pickling), while we use old Prego containers for things like storing leftovers and bringing food over to friends. Most boba shops will also let you bring your own thermos and fill it for you.

advertising2• 7 years ago

They still do the glass bottle returns in Mexico.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

Every large American city I’ve lived in has buy-back glass milk bottles in the major supermarkets.

I have about $35 worth in my garage right now. I really need to take them back and get my money.

nicoburns• 7 years ago

It seems like a good startup idea...

thaumasiotes2• 7 years ago

There is no garbage disposal problem -- disposal is easy and cheap.

Recycling is an attempt to address what people see as a product creation issue -- they object to the fact that resources are mined, smelted, drilled, refined, etc. in order to create new things, and see recycling as a way to ensure that less of that happens. "The same amount of plastic, but less drilling."

kodablah3• 7 years ago

It's not pushed to the producer, it's pushed to the consumer, just as charging more for trash does (which may be ideal depending on who you ask). Regardless, all this does is keeps those who have less from obtaining more, others will eat the costs. Seems everything that is disliked these days always has government taking money as the suggested solution. Even if it was the only way, plenty is already taken to rationally use it to help without using the tool punitively.

vohk• 7 years ago

What cost isn't eventually pushed to the consumer?

You pay more upfront, you pay more for disposal, you pay more in tax so the government can handle it, or you pay with a degrading environment in which to live.

Forcing producers to account for the full life cycle internalizes that particular externality and makes it an area they can compete in.

killjoywashere• 7 years ago

I don't always upvote, but when I do, it's for sharing of insights like this.

forgotmypw• 7 years ago

I've always thought recycling is a bit of a sham, designed primarily to provide some feel-good busywork for people who are concerned about environmental impact of using bad packaging, but not enough to change their habits.

sgc• 7 years ago

Not at all. Recycling glass and metal can be virtually perpetual, and applies to far more than just packaging. Recycling paper and plastic is obviously much more limited, and there should be funds derived from disposal fees that are used to research better, longer cycled alternatives (as well as improvements to existing recycling tech). But a 4-6x reduction in paper/plastic waste through recycling is extremely significant nonetheless.

Of course lifestyle change is an important part of any solution, but certainly not a panacea or even a desired exclusive remedy.

jeffdavis• 7 years ago

What are glass and metal? Seriously, we hardly use that stuff any more.

caoilte2• 7 years ago

I agree up until the last part. Habits aren't formed in a vacuum. Corporations sell products in bad packaging and for most people most of the time there is no reasonable way to avoid purchasing products in that form. The only way to change the situation is to legislate. A tax on packaging seems most pragmatic. Unfortunately, pragmatism would go against the prevailing dogmatic faith in the free market being the solution to all problems and so we do nothing.

dylan6043• 7 years ago

How does the tax on the packaging negatively affect the business? The business will just pass that cost directly onto the consumer.

AlexTWithBeard2• 7 years ago

Another way would be to make garbage collection "pay as you go", for example by charging for collection bags.

This is closer to "free market spirit", but creates a huge incentive to dump the garbage into the nearest river...

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

Perhaps, in the near long term, this is good news? Now wasteful America can't avoid the results of its ways? Up til now, it's been out of sight, out of mind. Sure, recycling plastic feels good. But less plastic - a petroleum byproduct - period would be noticeably better.

Perhaps, once the price of disposal goes up (and landfills are NIMBY) then root problem will finally be addressed? Perhaps, there is finally hope?

mc322• 7 years ago

If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already. We can see how people discarded things even when they were relatively expensive. Example all the different strata at the Troy/Troja site.

It’s hardly a modern problem. But in modern times we have added complications of sheer volume, toxicity, and lack of biodegradability.

coldtea4• 7 years ago

If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already

Disposal is a problem since the dawn of time in the general since (you need to dispose waste somewhere, even if you're an amoeba), but it's misleading to call it a problem anywhere close to today's sense back 3000 years ago.

It wasn't even close in neither quantity, nor quality.

mc322• 7 years ago

I already acknowledge that. My point is being expensive doesn’t make people dispose any less. If they are not useful they don’t get reused repurposed or recycled.

Given thd volume and unprofitability we can only find ways to process them to get rid of them. Those things which have value will be recycled, etc.

peter303• 7 years ago

Hunter gathers made large waste piles a 100,000 years ago. They are called shell midens and other things. We only see a fraction of these because sea level was much lower then.

everybodyknows• 7 years ago

Plastic clamshell containers are difficult to recycle because the material they’re made of is so flimsy—but it’s hard to find berries not sold in those containers, even at most farmers’ markets.

Yes, but it's easy to find farmers grateful to take them back for reuse. Same with those green plastic open baskets. Plastic produce bags can be brought back in a shopping bag for reuse by ourselves.

+1 for farmer's markets.

skybrian4• 7 years ago

It seems like the key is to get people to feel good about throwing things in the trash? There should be campaigns to "keep our recycling clean" and "when in doubt, throw it out".

Treating recycling as a moral issue may actually be making things worse, to the extent that encourages people to think that putting more stuff in the recycling bin is better.

fouc• 7 years ago

I think it would be a fascinating problem use some combination of AI/robots/etc to design a hugely effective way to sort garbage. Even better if it was possible to do an army of tiny robots that would just go out and fetch all the garbage etc.

ThomPete• 7 years ago

This is one of those things that should be viewed as a long term opportunity rather than a short term problem.

The worst solution would be to just find another country to send the garbage. The best solution would be new technologies locally which would allow us to deal with garbage.

lukeschlather• 7 years ago

Even in San Francisco, Reed kept pointing out items that aren’t easily recyclable but that keep showing up at the Recology plant: soy-sauce packets and pizza boxes

This is funny, because I was just at SFO yesterday where I got Sushi while waiting for my flight, and was confused by the lack of garbage receptacle. There was a "cans/bottles" recycling bin and a compost bin. A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.) So there's a fair amount of institutional negligence going on.

Havoc• 7 years ago

What's the issue with pizza boxes?

chrisseaton• 7 years ago

They're often soaked in grease. My community won't accept them for recycling either.

stevesimmons• 7 years ago

Saturated with grease

deftnerd• 7 years ago

As others pointed out, they're soaked with grease. In fact, the problem is so bad that enough pizza boxes bundled with clean cardboard has spoiled entire ton-sized bundles of cardboard shipped to China.

Cardboard is valuable to recycle, but our inability to remove contaminated cardboard from the recycling stream has really caused major issues. Because of that, China has stopped accepting paper and cardboard products from the US for their recycling operations.

Redoubts2• 7 years ago

Mine usually have a second cardboard sheet in them, so the rest of the box remains pristine.

shaftoe• 7 years ago

Do what most people do: pick a bin at random and throw everything in there.

It's likely everything goes to the same place anyway (and the bins are a lie) or there's a separation process that will handle it for you.

Before you downvote me: am I wrong? What else should a consumer in this situation reasonably do?

ryanwaggoner• 7 years ago

I take literally 2-3 seconds to scan the sign, but if I can’t figure it out, I default to trash. Our recycling systems are totally broken.

hn_throwaway_99• 7 years ago

The thing that irks me a bit is that most of all that separation to "recycling, compost, trash" is mostly for virtue signalling anyway, from both the store and customers. "Early era" recycling made a lot of sense, where the effort to separate high value, easy-to-decontaminate items (like aluminum cans and glass bottles) made sense. The economics and ecological aspects never made much sense once we went to large scale single stream recycling, but China's willingness to be the world's garbage can postponed that for a bit.

I think it would make a lot more sense if the bins were just "glass bottles", "aluminum cans" and "everything else", but then people would feel less good about all the stuff they throw away.

refurb• 7 years ago

Upvoted for accuracy. Even people that put recyclables in the bins throw dirty containers in which are later separated and put in a landfill.

Recology constantly complains about this. Who wants to spend 5 min washing an old peanut butter jar so it’s clean enough to recycle?

The answer is very few people.

Redoubts2• 7 years ago

the bins are a lie

I've definitely seen facilities workers throwing everything into the same bag.

nostrademons4• 7 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if the large institutions with just recycle + compost bins know that all your waste just ends up in the trash anyway, and they're just labeling the trash bins as "recycle" and "compost" to make eco-conscious consumers feel better.

lostapathy4• 7 years ago

Sands convention center in Las Vegas just has trash cans that are marked with a label indicating the whole waste stream has recyclables sorted out of it. who knows what the truth is.

bitL• 7 years ago

In Japan they collect different types of trash on different days at firmly set times at dedicated spots; if you miss the day/time or aren't quick enough to get to the spot prior to collection, you have to keep that trash for another week. It was quite an experience when I lived in Kyoto (near Tō-ji temple) to observe/take part in this process.

bamboozled• 7 years ago

Also in Tokyo people seemed to be employed at the housing complex level to make sure the trash is going into the best place possible for recycling or incineration.

lsllc2• 7 years ago

Amazing how many people think "single stream recycling" means the recyclables get sorted from the garbage!

thaumasiotes2• 7 years ago

A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.)

To be fair to the sign, I'm betting you weren't charged for the soy packets. You didn't even receive ownership of the tray.

alexandercrohde• 7 years ago

Plastic: A real problem as burning it releases estrogens (more formally 'endocrine disrupters') into the air. However $1 bottle deposit and glass bottles seems entirely viable to me. Maybe a bit of an adjustment, but a hundred times smarter than burning.

Papers: As far as I know this can just biodegrade. Compostable, no?

remote_phone• 7 years ago

We should only allow fully recycled plastic everywhere. Completely outlaw single-use plastic that can’t be easily recycled.

Everything else should be compostable. Everything else should have a fee associated with disposal. Things with dangerous chemicals like batteries, etc should have high amounts of returnable deposits.

Yes, it’s going to be expensive but it’s worth it.

jerrac• 7 years ago

Has anyone run across something that would work at the individual home level? A machine that sorts and cleans the plastic into small bales in your garage. Maybe something similar for paper and aluminum?

jelliclesfarm• 7 years ago

What about plasma incinerators?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

skunkworker• 7 years ago

I've wondered about this as well, I guess in land-constrained locations this could be advantageous, but AFAIK they are not energy-positive on their output.

onetimemanytime• 7 years ago

Off topic, but isn't it amazing that shipping garbage across many oceans is profitable?

Animats2• 7 years ago

If we can somehow figure out how to better sort recycling, some U.S. markets for plastics and paper may emerge.

The technology exists and is in production. Here's a new 90 ton per hour recycling plant, from Bulk Handling Systems, in California.[1] This is a good video to watch to see the whole process. Some of the separation is done with the usual air separators, vibrators, and screens. Optical sorters controlling air jets do some of the separation. This plant has no manual pickers; it uses AI vision controlled robots for the hard separation stations. This is not a prototype; it's a big production plant.

Separating different plastics can be done with near infrared multispectral imaging. Here's a TOMRA sorter doing that in a real plant.[2] That's from 2015.

Finally, here's a big plant in LA which takes in plastic bottles and puts out clean plastic pellets ready for injection molding into new bottles.[3]

China is still accepting US plastics for recycling. It just has to be sorted down to 0.5% contamination, and that's being checked. The standard used to be 1.5%, it wasn't really enforced, and 5% contamination was not uncommon. US recyclers have to upgrade their facilities to the point that there's no manual picking required on the output.

Big cities are dealing with this. Smaller communities have problems, because they don't have enough volume for the newer equipment and don't generate enough material to find buyers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=254&v=4FpsH_ETT7... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0OZ7Mlmkvk [3] https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside... [4] https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-standard-...

Scoundreller5• 7 years ago

The optical scanners sometimes can’t read black plastics.

It just absorbs IR.

We should discourage them.

The scanners are cool since they’re analyzing the plastic itself; not reading codes.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/restaurants-coffee-pl...

Scoundreller5• 7 years ago

We should discourage them

By that, I mean discourage the black plastics, not the optical scanners!

leke• 7 years ago

I'm hoping innovation happens.

crb002• 7 years ago

Cardboard/paper can go to EU and South America. Electronics can get mixed in with ore worst case. Best solution w electronics is grinding and separating them in house and reselling to rare earth refiners.

IshKebab• 7 years ago

Then there’s the challenge of educating people about what can and can’t be recycled

I have never lived anywhere where the local council has made any remote effort to do this properly. Surely they'll list a few common items that can and can't be recycled - like maybe 10 things. But people come into contact with a vast array of different items. 10 doesn't cut it.

They mention wire coat hangers - why can't they be recycled? I would have thought since they are metal they could easily be magnetically separated and melted down with all the other metal. No recycling box says whether or not you can recycle wire coat hangers so you just have to guess.

abootstrapper2• 7 years ago

Producers have to be made responsible for disposal. Perhaps a tax on the weight and type of material of the packaging minus recovered and reused materials.

andrewstuart• 7 years ago

To solve the problem: stop making the packaging/garbage.

It's not solved by working out what to do with all the packaging/garbage, it's solved by stopping making it.

"Recycling" is the distraction/sleight of hand that the packaging industry uses to make you feel OK with the infinite spew of garbage it creates. Finally China has shown the lie of recycling.

In your kitchen, if the water tap is gushing water onto the floor, you don't spend all your time focusing on how to mop up the water, you turn off the tap. Same thing.

nobodyandproud• 7 years ago

The answer is to put the burden of recycling back on the manufacturer, and add a refundable cost to packaging on purchase.

Businesses have zero incentive make products easy to recycle.

If I recall, the only recycling success stories involve aluminum, glass, and perhaps paper. These are relatively easy to recycle, yet even these required financial incentives.

advertising2• 7 years ago

What about the idea of everyone having their own cup and water bottle that they take everywhere. If you want the drink to go and forget your cup, buy a new one at a high price or have it there.

merpnderp2• 7 years ago

I'd bet one of the most immediate consequences is a lot less plastic winds up in the oceans. We know just a few rivers and cities account for nearly all ocean plastic, and I'd assume several of these are major routes for imported plastics.

sct202• 7 years ago

Yeah I watched a documentary on what happens to the imported 'recycled' plastic, and stuff was blowing away in the wind, burning, kids were picking thru it by hand, etc. I'm not surprised that China would want to put a damper on the whole thing.

merpnderp2• 7 years ago

I bet I watched the same documentary, and I was overjoyed when China banned imports. The US and most western countries have spent a ton of money upgrading garbage dumps to have moisture barriers, large fences, and other containment features, and the plastic is much safer there than in the oceans.

hedora• 7 years ago

California could raise a tax, let’s call it a “CRV” tax for container redemption value, and then use it to subsidize curbside pickup of pre-sorted recycling.

Seriously though, at the current 5-20 cents per container crv tax, how can recycling in California not be profitable for the state?

Where is that money going?!?

HillaryBriss6• 7 years ago

much of it goes to individuals who collect and sort the materials and bring them to recycling centers for a cash reward.

a lot of times, these individuals collect the materials from big blue bins consumers have carefully filled and placed at the curbside near their residences.

another place the money goes is to people in Arizona who gather plastics in that state and truck it across the border to cash in on California's generous recycling rewards program.

zmmmmm• 7 years ago

I guess this might be an unpopular opinion, but I've never seen hard numbers proving that recycling is actually necessary. I am curious, what would be the consequences of simply digging big holes and burying all our rubbish? I understand that some of it generates greenhouse gasses, so that might have to be dealt with separately. But for general inert waste, is it that bad to just stick it in the ground?

unstrafed• 7 years ago

In 1990, A. Clark Wiseman from Gonzaga calculated that if we dug a landfill 100 yards deep and put in all trash generated in the US for the next millennium, it would fit in a square area of land 35 miles on each side (assuming of course levels of consumption and disposal from the time). By point of comparison, replacing all existing energy sources with solar and wind power would require orders of magnitude more acreage. I'm not sure if most New Yorkers have ever seen a place like e.g. Nevada, but I'm not exactly worried about the amount of land needed for landfills.

New technologies allow landfill operators to extract some of the waste and use it for industrial purposes (particularly methane, with potent greenhouse emissions, albeit relatively short-lived). It also remains true that some forms of recycling - paper, cardboard and metals like aluminum or steel - are still cost effective, provided that the public stops trying to recycle their pizza boxes. I've often wondered if environmental policy would be better served by focusing on sorting high-quality, cost-effective recyclables into recycling plants and putting everything else into the landfill.

IMO, recycling has ceased being about - or perhaps never was about - economic efficiency or ecological health, and is mostly a cheap way for people to feel like they're doing the right thing. I have become somewhat skeptical about recycling, and even I feel the shame of being a heretic against pathos-laden gospel first preached in grade school for failing to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

There are endless 'convenience' obscenities built into the consumer interface that could easily be eliminated through legislation. Many 'solutions' were invented up to a century ago, then discarded over the years (for convience/profit).

Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce.

Milk bottles ... soda bottles ...

Example: Grocery stores used to pack groceries into boxes products were shipped in. 'Want plastic or paper?' NEITHER. Consumer may choose to bring in/rent re-useable crates.

And so on. There are -endless- working solutions that will eliminate the massive costs of creating all of this waste and of disposing of it. WE have let this happen, and WE deserved the consequences.

dec0dedab0de2• 7 years ago

Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce.

Or maybe just raise the quality of tap water

leoh• 7 years ago

It seems to me that landfill prices ought to be baked into the price of products sold.

Camillo2• 7 years ago

Whenever we're talking about mass transit, or communications, or trains, or pretty much any other piece of infrastructure, there are always lots of people saying that America can't do things like Europe does because it's huge, everything is dispersed, there are enormous low-density stretches, etc.

Where are all those people when the subject turns to garbage infrastructure? If you have so much empty space, take some of it and make a huge landfill! Put it in a desert or something. Make some hills out of garbage.

There's precedent, too. When the US government needed to test nuclear weapons, they got a big honking piece of desert and nuked it. When they needed an area with very low RF interference for some spy stuff, they found some low-density place and banned radios there. When they need to test artillery, desert again.

HillaryBriss6• 7 years ago

maybe it's time for more plasphalt

https://www.dot.state.pa.us/public/Bureaus/design/SEMP/FACTS...

Animats2• 7 years ago

Maybe the US should have high tariffs on packaging materials to prevent their importation and force domestic manufacture.

lumberingjack• 7 years ago

Alot of my Immediate family works for one of the largest trash pickup, dump, and recycling facilities in the Midwest you're kidding yourself if you think that recycling is keeping stuff out of the dump when they get overloaded with too much recycling which is about every 3 days everything goes to the dump most plastics go to the dump only about 10% of a really gets recycled.

What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. Recycling

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