Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-asia-plastic-waste-20190617-story.html

by ilamont • 7 years ago

428 220 7 years ago

neonate• 7 years ago

opportune• 7 years ago

As far as I can understand it, the recycling industry is a well-intentioned waste of resources. It would be much better for the environment for all this waste to be sequestered in a landfill than for people to pay to ship it around the world only for most of it to be dumped or rejected (which, even when the Asian countries in question do accept it, they are likely to do anyway). These materials (plastics) are so cheap to produce that it will probably never be economical to recycle them, unless recycling them entails cleaning them and reusing them in their original state.

I think a lot of people have undeservedly negative emotional reactions to the concept of sending waste to landfills. Waste in landfills is waste that won't find its way into the rest of the environment. Plastic not decomposing is bad in that it ties up resources for a very long time, but it's good in that it doesn't even produce methane waste in landfills. And I'm guessing it takes less CO2 to ship X kilos of plastic around the world and reprocess it than to dispose of the plastic close to its source and produce X new kilos of plastic.

Scoundreller7• 7 years ago

And plastics are cheaper than ever in N. America.

We fractionate the ethane out from natural gas, and we’re fracking a lot of natural gas.

And it isn’t easy to store ethane, so we’re turning on more and more plants to turn it into polyethylene.

At least in winter, the ethane can be used to froth up gasoline, but in summer, there’s not a lot to do with ethane.

Reedx• 7 years ago

And with that approach it'd be easier to reclaim if/when we figure out a good way to re-use it.

Basically plastic deposits that could be conveniently mined in the future.

umvi• 7 years ago

So what you are saying is we need to create more plastics since they sequester carbon better than plants!

tomjakubowski• 7 years ago

Like the comforting lie I tell myself when printing a long paper: you're sequestering carbon!

Bakary• 7 years ago

A more prosaic explanation is that recycling is primarily aimed at removing garbage from the first world rather than environmental friendliness.

jlawson• 7 years ago

Non-biodegradeable plastic is a carbon sequestering scheme.

undersuit• 7 years ago

Breaking windows stimulates the local economy.

mediaman3• 7 years ago

You're confusing mixed waste, the subject of the article, with all recycling.

It's true that mixed waste is difficult to process and is often best in a landfill or clean incinerator.

But properly sorted plastics are perfectly usable, and they are cheaper than virgin plastics. The reason they are cheaper is that it is less expensive to clean and regrind them than it is to process new, virgin plastic. Virgin polypropylene currently fetches about $0.65 a pound, whereas recycled clear polypropylene is sold for $0.50-0.55 a pound. These plastics are typically recycled within the same region as the origin of the waste plastic, and, due to freight, often get re-used in industry in the same region as well.

SomeOldThrow6• 7 years ago

Well-intentioned is a stretch. We really just shouldn’t be using plastic for disposable products, and corporations take advantage of peoples’ lack of knowledge of recycling to neglect their responsibility of proper disposal and pricing. Given the effect of plastic on the environment single use plastics should be priced higher than their (eg) metal counterparts. (This is assuming those have priced in externalities, so I realize this is reductive, but I believe my point is clear.)

I’m staring at a unilever plastic container with cute recycling logos on the side, and I have no consumer option to price compare with a more sustainable option, let alone vote with my wallet. What a waste of materials.

Granted, lighting the materials on fire so I can drive around the countryside isn’t much better.

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

We really just shouldn’t be using plastic for disposable products

Huh... I would've expected to read we very much should be using plastics for disposables. (Do you want a metal or cloth trash bag?) Rather the problem I see is disposing so much in the first place.

rlpb2• 7 years ago

it will probably never be economical to recycle them

While we're talking in hypotheticals, I think the economics of recycling needs to take into account the negative externality of environmentally safe disposal cost in production. In other words, if we actually priced in the cost of safe disposal into the cost of plastic products, then recycling wouldn't have to be viable economically based on the price of recycled plastic alone. Europe already does this for household electrical waste; there is no reason it cannot be done for plastics.

JamesBarney• 7 years ago

Are you talking the cost of putting it into a landfill?

spullara• 7 years ago

It seems obvious to me that we will eventually be a lot better at recycling or the materials will be worth a lot more. If you can keep it around without it polluting the environment outside of the landfill, you should dig it up later and recycle it with superior technology and/or when there is much more demand.

tomc19853• 7 years ago

Why can't the US develop domestic waste-processing capabilities? We could be generating power from incineration plants.

pkaye• 7 years ago

It was cheaper to send it overseas rather than to invest in alternative technologies. So if any company tries to develop some technology, they might not get funding. Imagine if gasoline was 10x cheaper how much it would slow down development of electric cars.

Scoundreller7• 7 years ago

Pollution control standards make incineration expensive.

It’s not like the US is going to run out of land for landfills.

tomc19853• 7 years ago

Yes but can't you have a closed system that compacts the exhaust into solid matter?

Baeocystin2• 7 years ago

You could (at great expense) build an incineration plant that scrubbed its exhaust gasses of most pollutants, but CO2 remains the big issue. It is just plain better to bury it in properly-designed landfills.

CaptainCook• 7 years ago

A company in Utah has a process for turning plastics of various grades into diesel fuel. Salt Lake City, Boise, and it looks like Phoenix now as well are working with them to recycle plastics. [Edit: The company is called Renewlogy]

https://kjzz.org/content/859146/phoenix-convert-plastic-wast...

"The City of Phoenix announced Wednesday it will soon begin converting certain plastic waste into liquid fuel.

The fifth most populous city in the country has partnered with a waste management company and Renewlogy, a technology firm, to convert plastics 3-7 into fuel.

Plastic items with a number between 3 and 7 in the recycling symbol are considered “low-value” and are expensive to recycle. The city expects the project to divert 10 tons of plastic waste from landfills every day, producing 60 barrels of liquid fuel."

Other articles:

https://inhabitat.com/renewlogy-turns-low-grade-plastic-into...

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900014582/utah-based-ren...

colechristensen• 7 years ago

To be useful people have to actually sort and clean their recyclables.

For example, plastic bottle caps and rings on soda, milk, etc. are a different plastic than the rest of the container and must be removed as they are not recyclable.

Many people don't understand recycling at all and fill it with garbage.

devoply• 7 years ago

Replace with glass and aluminum, with what's left over burn it. That way it has no way of creating any other problems in the future. If you are efficient with burning it you could even capture the greenhouse gasses produced as a result and sequester those.

anon_cow11112• 7 years ago

As someone who rides a bicycle and hikes, glass bottles are the bane of my existence.

mattmanser• 7 years ago

Get reusable plastic ones and decant then.

arcticbull• 7 years ago

Are aluminum bottles problematic? Sigg makes some great ones.

s3krit• 7 years ago

In my country, you return glass bottles for re-use for about 15 euro cents. We don't see a lot of shattered glass bottles lying around...

yeahitslikethat2• 7 years ago

Glass as is too heavy. Penn and Teller did a bull shit on recycling. Only aluminum is good for consumer packaging wrt recycling.

morio• 7 years ago

Most aluminum packaging has plastic liner. Which has to be burned away in most cases.

Glass works if you bottle and reuse locally. Unfortunately infrastructure for this is long gone in the US.

pen2l• 7 years ago

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It's simple, fun, and environmentally friendly. Why don't we do this with... milk, juice, etc.? Why not do this with everything really?

wil4212• 7 years ago

Plastic is cheaper and doesn’t shatter. Some states in the US still have the refund thing for bottles. I’ve seen a vending machine in NYC for bottle refunds and one in Munich, Germany.

When I was in Central America they wouldn’t let you leave the store with the bottle. They would provide a plastic bag where you could sip the coke out with a straw.

eli• 7 years ago

To be clear: the bottle redemption machines in New York crush bottles, they don't save them for reuse

jjar• 7 years ago

Germany is interesting - they have a nationwide bottle return system. Every supermarket over a certain size is required to have a bottle return system in place, and compensate you accordingly. It's called the "pfand" (deposit) system.

dqpb• 7 years ago

They're heavier.

syspec• 7 years ago

Because it's cheaper to create new plastic, is the simple and unfortunate answer.

christophilus• 7 years ago

We used to do this in the US. Then the throwaway generation happened.

There are still pockets where such reuse happens. My local growler house, and some of my local dairies, for example. I wish more business supported reuse of containers, though.

ivankolev• 7 years ago

People often mention hygiene and complicated logistics as the reason disposable plastic packaging was adopted. I think as with lots of other examples through history, it is hard to know beforehand the negativities of an application of technology.

layoutIfNeeded3• 7 years ago

Hygiene? You can safely clean glassware with the most aggressive of chemicals, then maybe run it through an autoclave for extra safety.

Funny that people complain about glassware hygiene while chugging phtalate-infused beverages from plastic bottles.

netfire• 7 years ago

The problem with glass is that it isn’t biodegradable. If it gets broken, it can cause a hazard for humans and wildlife. If it gets thrown away, it’s not going to break down. Glass is good for the ideal case, but not great for the other use cases. For milk and juice, it’s seems like thick paper might be a better option, since it’s biodegradable and recyclable.

xyzzyz3• 7 years ago

Glass is literally molten sand. It will break down just like the rock breaks down. It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock. This not to say that we should just don't care and throw away glass anywhere we want, but it's really not a huge deal, unless you hate seeing glass pebbles among normal rock pebbles.

athenot2• 7 years ago

Glass is essentially sand. Sure it may be sharp when it just broke, but it gets dull pretty fast in nature.

Of all the things that got dumped onto this beach at Ft Bragg, glass was the least problematic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_Calif...

deogeo• 7 years ago

Because of industry lobbying: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/11/06/packaging-indust...

They are bribing our politicians so that they would not be prevented from poisoning our world. 'Enemy' is too kind a word for such people.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

The US was gearing up nicely to require deposit and reuse schemes in the 50s or 60s. Vermont was about to require drinks be in reusable bottles.

Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Philip Morris and others got together, conceived the idea of, funded and launched "Keep America Beautiful". Vermont was lobbied and the deposit scheme died, consumers were blamed for the whole problem via campaigns on littering, and industry could do whatever the hell they liked.

Greenwashing was born.

hexis• 7 years ago

Bottle and can deposit has been going on in Massachusetts since at least the 80's (when I was growing up there) - https://www.mass.gov/deposit-bottle-can-recycling

flyinghamster• 7 years ago

On the other hand, up until about the late 1970s or early 80s, Coke and Pepsi in the US were typically sold in eight-packs of 16 fl. oz. returnable bottles. These were returned to the store, which refunded the deposit on the bottles, and the delivery trucks would take the empties back to the bottling plant to be cleaned and reused. The bottoms of old-school Coke bottles were stamped with their original bottling plant, as well, although bottles often turned up far from their original plants.

No need for laws, but then Big Soft Drink got greedy and pushed for the disposable mess we're now stuck with, because, hey, no more money spent on washing bottles.

I think it's about time more state legislatures enact bottle deposits. I've noticed that highways in Michigan ($0.10 bottle deposit) are a hell of a lot cleaner than in Illinois (no bottle deposit).

ryanianian• 7 years ago

There is a company called Loop that is shipping and re-using packaging. Much of it is aluminum. (Personally I'm looking forward to laundry detergent not coming in an extremely thick single-use plastic thing I know will end up in a landfill.)

Glass is very heavy relative to other materials so you've got to include the added shipping weight into CO2 calculations. Glass makes a lot of sense for things you don't buy very often where the ratio of product-use-count vs weight is high (condiments, cleaning products, personal-hygiene, etc).

jessaustin3• 7 years ago

I always buy detergent in a cardboard box? That's probably not great either...

goda90• 7 years ago

We could even do reusable plastic bottles. I saw it a lot in Chile. They'd have a deposit on 3-liter coke bottles with a thick plastic. You'd exchange the old bottle when you bought a new one to avoid the deposit. Then they'd take those, clean them, and refill them. Often the bottom would even be a bit banged up from multiple uses.

luisaguimaraes• 7 years ago

Yes, also in Germany they use reusable plastic bottles. But the companies in other states argue that it is hard to introduce the system. It would definitely be easier to use just glass bottles.

UI_at_80x24• 7 years ago

I'm ~45 years old. When I was a child this was the case. As a side note Milk came in plastic bags even then. But all carbonated beverages came in multiple sized glass bottles. In the Mid-80's (IIRC) there was an attempt to sell Coke-a-Cola in 2L size bottles but the glass couldn't handle the pressures and were apt to explode easily.

2L plastic bottles don't have this limitation.

theklub• 7 years ago

We do this in a few states. Actually I grew up in one of them and just assumed it was nation wide.

Baeocystin2• 7 years ago

A lot of people have commented about plastic just being cheaper, etc., but the core aspect is that glass is simply very heavy for the volume contained, and requires greater care when handling at all stages of the use process. Shipping all that extra weight has real carbon consequences as well.

fleetingmoments• 7 years ago

I'd like to see reusable silicone packaging. Bonus points if the containers are standardised like shipping containers and fit together in a way that maximises internal volume, like the cells of a honeycomb. Who wouldn't like a container that is hydrophobic, making it easy to get every last bit of yoghurt out.

city41• 7 years ago

This does happen at a small scale in the US. I usually buy milk in glass bottles that when returned are washed and reused.

Spooky234• 7 years ago

The argument that you’ll typically hear from business/engineering folks is that the carbon footprint of the glass bottle is too high because of the cost of manufacture, transport and washing.

The same argument was made in favor of styrofoam cups. I’m a skeptic.

ip26• 7 years ago

The most legitimate challenge is branding. Each company wants their own style bottle, maybe with a certain color to protect it from light, or maybe just with a certain visual appeal. If you have a universal bottle, they can be collected & reused anywhere. Pretty simple. But if the ten thousand different drink companies each have to collect, sort, & ship their bottles back to their processing plants that suddenly becomes a massive problem.

theaeolist• 7 years ago

This could be standardised by the government if there is political will. Standard beer bottle, wine bottle, liqueur bottle etc. Non-standard bottle don't need to be banned, but surtaxed.

sgeisler• 7 years ago

As a counterpoint: I live in Germany where we have such a system in place. When I went to the US for a few months not having such a system in place actually felt liberating. Suddenly I didn't have to worry about storing bottles, how to get them back to the store, etc. I just threw them into the recycling bin.

This might not be a problem for families or people that actually plan their grocery shopping and go there by car to buy for a whole week. But for me as someone who just stops at the store every day on the way home to get whatever I need it's really hard to bring empty bottles back to the store (I won't carry around empty bottles all day).

lunchables• 7 years ago

My guess is the cost in transport/logistics to reuse, cleaning and other potential liabilities outweigh the cost of simply manufacturing lots and lots of very cheap plastic bottles. Glass is heavy and dangerous. Plastic is incredibly cheap and lightweight.

This is based on nothing other than gut intuition and someone will probably come along and correct me.

rchaud• 7 years ago

In Ontario, you pay a small deposit ($0.10) for each glass bottle of beer. You can bring the bottles back to the store and get refunded the deposit.

olliej• 7 years ago

Good for them - until recently it had never occurred to me that many “recycling” programs were just “send it to another country”.

It wasn’t until someone on HN pointed out to me that even most plastic “recycling” is just shredding and using for things like carpet.

The long term solution seems to replace most plastics with paper/cardboard and actually compostable materials (which doesn’t really include the compostable plastics)

carapace• 7 years ago

For a fascinating (and less sensational) read on the global recycling trade I recommend "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286721-junkyard-planet

chrisanthropic2• 7 years ago

The first time I really started thinking about this was years ago after watching the recycling episode of "Penn & Teller: Bullshit" where they essentially warn that many recycling programs consist of shipping our waste elsewhere for someone else to deal with and that some day the countries we send our "recycling"/waste to will likely get sick of it and start rejecting it and we'll be fucked.

That was almost 10 years ago

Scoundreller7• 7 years ago

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong in sending materials elsewhere for cheap sorting or re-manufacturing.

Especially when ships and containers are going that way empty anyway.

chrisanthropic2• 7 years ago

While I basically agree, one of the arguments in the episode (as I remember it, it's been a while) is that since we ship it away, we don't see the negative results of our lifestyle choices, making the problems created easier to ignore.

Also, they argue that modern landfills _can_ be pretty damned "green", capturing the heat/gases created and using them to generate power.

But since we've prioritized and financially incentivized recycling (shipping everything somewhere else) we haven't prioritized responsible ways to manage waste locally and once our waste gets rejected we'll likely to be playing catch-up.

I guess we'll see. Or we'll all die before then.

Shrug.

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

The problem is mis-representing what's in the shipment.

(There's probably a lot of plausible deniability in the system. People throw a lot of trash into recycling bins for lots of reasons, including ignorance or laziness. Trash companies don't take responsibility to make sure that's what's in the bin is actually what's supposed to be there.)

Read the article. There's dirty diapers mixed in with so-called "recyclables."

asenna• 7 years ago

Funny how this came up here. Just a couple of days ago, I was debating with my brother about recycling and told him to look up an old Penn & Teller episode on this topic. That episode really left an impact on me and looks like many others.

Barrin92• 7 years ago

For a great fiction take on the issue The Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan and recently translated into English by Ken Liu is well worth a read.

nitwit005• 7 years ago

Other than the diplomatic issue of sending it back, "Asian countries take a stand against their own recycling industries" seems more accurate. There was someone buying it on the other end.

Spooky234• 7 years ago

It’s also a good PR hit after the discovery that oceanic plastic pollution comes from a few rivers in Asia.

doomjunky• 7 years ago

How can we find out whose garbage is it?

kabacha• 7 years ago

Yeah, original title is absurd. I've never seen as much plastic waste as I see in Asia. I mean I've got called names few times for refusing plastic bag lol.

evancox100• 7 years ago

The move to single-stream recycling probably represents the single largest setback in the U.S. to the cause of waste reduction.

butisaidsudo• 7 years ago

From what I understand, shipping containers are sent out from Asia stuffed with goods, but there isn't nearly as much going in the other direction. The containers need to go back whether they're full or not, which is why it ends up being so cheap to ship plastic. And the CO2 caused doesn't really change as a result.

To the rest of your point though, I agree. My wife is a hardline recycler. I generally am too, but I have a hard time seeing the benefit in recycling soft plastics.

snthd• 7 years ago

Cargo ships are designed to float at a certain level in the water - if they're too empty they carry ballast instead. This causes it's own problems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballast_water_discharge_and_th...

basilgohar• 7 years ago

Thank you for the included link. This is an aspect of international shipping about which I was wholly ignorant. The particular section mentioning the "international exchange" occurring in Singapore was particularly concerning because even species from areas not visited by the transiting vessels can "hitch a ride", so to speak.

chewz• 7 years ago

It is like ships carrying opium to China had to take Chinese porcelain as balast on the way back.

https://southchinaenvir.com/opium-dreams-speedy-clipper-ship...

shados• 7 years ago

Is there really much of a point in recycling anything but reasonably clean paper/cardboard (I know stuff like greasy pizza boxes won't get recycled), and clean metals (like aluminum cans). Like, aside for those, will much realistically get recycled?

Aside for the insane amount of amazon boxes I toss in recycling, so very little of my trash fits the bill of things that will reasonably get recycled...

LeifCarrotson• 7 years ago

Glass is another (the other?) material which is worthwhile to recycle. Like plastic, glass never decomposes. Unlike plastic and unlike paper/cardboard, it can be endlessly remelted and remade into new products without a loss in quality. It's a huge savings in material and energy cost to use recycled glass in the manufacture of new glass.

If you have a recycling bin labeled "glass", absolutely do throw (place) glass bottles into it. It will almost certainly be valued and reused. If you have a single-stream recycling output - just one bin labeled "Recycling", there's less of a case...processing and separating is more expensive and less successful, and a small fraction will actually get recycled.

audunw• 7 years ago

Parts of Europe has a good system for recycling plastic bottles. It works because you’re getting only one type of plastic in and nothing else. Look up Tomra machines.

Food waste might also be worth it? You can get some biofuel and compost out of it, which isn’t bad.

The US systems have mostly seemed completely pointless to me. Many of them seems to optimize for feeling good (I put it in the recycling bin!) rather than doing what it takes to make it worthwhile (I took the bottles and cans back to the shop and put it in a machine that verifies them, crushes them and sends them back to where they came from)

CydeWeys• 7 years ago

My understanding is that the temperature used to melt aluminum, steel, and other metals for recycling is so high that food waste burns off quickly and doesn't pose any contamination problems. At worst you might have some slag to skim off the top.

Paper is the main thing that frequently has contamination problems, because it can't be treated with high heat during the recycling problem lest you just end up paper. Even plastic is heated pretty decently during the recycling process.

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

You would need people to sort it by hand. There is no way you're going to find people who want to do that for a living in Western Europe. And even if you did you would have to pay them a decent wage.

tartinipaolo• 7 years ago

Scary! So bad plastics are so cheap that no one wants to substitute them.

cortesoft• 7 years ago

There is this strange belief that landfills are taking up a ton of space and we need to reduce landfill usage because of it.

This is simply not true. Landfills don't take up much space, we have plenty.

weberc2• 7 years ago

This is pretty much what the environmentalists were preaching when I was growing up. Not sure why to be honest. In retrospect it certainly seems like "but the landfills!" is the lesser of all evils.

nostrademons2• 7 years ago

Probably a combination of NIMBYism and poor land-use planning. Back when many of these landfills were created, they were on the outskirts of urban areas, where "outskirts" = 15-20 miles away. After the wave of suburbanization in the 1950s-80s, suddenly those outskirts are right next to someone's home. Now it's a crisis.

Most people's conception of what land is available is limited to their local metropolitan area, and they have no idea just how abundant land is in the hinterlands. You could probably bury all the nation's garbage in the craters left inside the Nevada Proving Grounds, which is a radioactive wasteland anyway. And shipping contains of garbage 500 miles from LA, Vegas, and SF to Northern Nevada looks a lot more appealing when you've gotten used to shipping it 10,000 miles to China.

sgustard• 7 years ago

I want to believe that, but then we have this 65 meter trash pile in Delhi.

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/india-trash-mo...

SomeOldThrow6• 7 years ago

The point remains true, that’s just a shitty place for a landfill. The issue isn’t space, it’s our use of resources.

jjeaff• 7 years ago

That's not a space issue. That's an improper handling issue.

icelancer• 7 years ago

This has way more to do with India than what the person said.

solstice• 7 years ago

I think there are much more important issues like space: Improperly constructed and maintained landfills (i.e. most of them) leak pollutants into the ground (water) and offgas significant quantities of methane. (No sources handy right now...)

codedokode3• 7 years ago

This is currently an issue in Russia. Big cities like Moscow produce a lot of waste and the cheapest way to utilise it was to dump to a landfill in a countryside. Now people living nearby are protesting because the gases from the landfill are carried by the wind to their town several kilemeters away.

toephu2• 7 years ago

Source?

Landfills take up a lot of space. I saw a documentary about it (forgot the name of it). Humans waste so much and the trash keeps piling up. You can only dig so much.

jlmorton• 7 years ago

Landfills are three dimensional and the Earth is astonishingly large. On millennia timescales, we will never run out of places to put them.

At a depth of 400 feet, the entire US annual trash output is approximately 1,000 acre [1].

There are 37 billion acres on earth. And indeed, much of that is not very habitable land.

And importantly, landfill space is not permanently lost. There are many beautiful parks around the world built atop landfills.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...

taneq2• 7 years ago

This has always been my point of confusion. The ground's gotta be made of something. Rocks don't decompose. Why is it an issue if the ground's made of something that's not rock and doesn't decompose?

If it's leaking toxic breakdown byproducts out into the water table or something then that's an issue, sure, but "things going to landfill" seems to be treated as axiomatically bad by most people.

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

It's because of the Mobro 4000. Corrupt mafia fuckery that got mistaken for a environmental crisis.

cybersnowflake• 7 years ago

The real story, is not that China is simply refusing waste, what nobody is really talking about is how the omnipresent dogma we've been indoctrinated with since childhood, that all this recycling is doing all this good is a flatout lie. And its mostly just been going to dumps in China.

I mean it would be as if the whole world suddenly discovered one day that Santa wasn't real. At the bare minimum this angle deserved a few months at frontpage billing but it just passed by without any notice in favor of continuing 24hr coverage of the latest mean Trump Tweet.

gesman• 7 years ago

“This is rubbish that you know cannot be recycled, and it makes me really angry that our country has to endure this,” she said in an interview.

Were they ever forced to accept this with no say into this?

Or it's just change of mindset to stop selling their own country as a garbage dump?

rishav_sharan• 7 years ago

This is simply a political issue at this point. If there is political will, then we can ban all consumer plastic. We used to live fine without them 40 years ago. We can do so again.

Damn the inconvenience. We must plug this at both source and disposal.

protonfish2• 7 years ago

If you made a case that this would be better for the environment, which I have yet to see. Plastic waste is not toxic, nor does it use a lot of energy to produce.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

Microplastics which are irremovable from the environment would beg to differ. Those are what need to be banned.

dflock2• 7 years ago

Plastic waste is not toxic

It absolutely is. It breaks down into micro-plastics, which are sub-celluar sized plastic particles. These have a large surface area and are easily absorbed into tissues and cells. They then leech out whatever additives are in that particular piece of plastic - plasticizers, colourings, etc...

Some of these are directly toxic/harmful when released into tissues and cells - and lots of them are endocrine disruptors: molecules with a very similar 3d shape to hormones:

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that can interfere with endocrine (or hormone) systems at certain doses. These disruptions can cause cancerous tumors, birth defects, and other developmental disorders.[1] Any system in the body controlled by hormones can be derailed by hormone disruptors. Specifically, endocrine disruptors may be associated with the development of learning disabilities, severe attention deficit disorder, cognitive and brain development problems; deformations of the body (including limbs); breast cancer, prostate cancer, thyroid and other cancers; sexual development problems such as feminizing of males or masculinizing effects on females, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

The toxins the microplastic leaches into seawater inhibit the growth and photosynthetic efficiency of the bacteria Prochlorococcus, which is responsible for producing an estimated 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe. That means Prochlorococcus is also responsible for 20 percent of carbon capture on this planet (one molecule of carbon goes in, one molecule of oxygen goes out), theoretically spelling trouble for humanity’s quest to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere. This is early research that comes with several big caveats, and also exposes the challenges of studying a threat as new and omnipresent as plastic pollution.

https://www.wired.com/story/ocean-plastics-bacteria/

Etc, etc, etc...

Joakal• 7 years ago

Alternative is that the companies must take back un-recycable waste as condition to sell. Then suddenly, garbage is allowed to be sent back to Asian countries!!

eschaton• 7 years ago

The fundamental problem here is that the cost paid for a good does not directly include the cost to reclaim and/or sequester it. That cost is externalized, and so it winds up seeking a local minima, with serious adverse effects on the total system. If these costs are incorporated, everyone’s incentives are aligned and solutions will be found.

throw20162• 7 years ago

Whenever it comes to issues of environmental concern there is always an 'authoritative' comment hand waving away objections and pretending to be on the side of 'science' but offering no scientific evidence, rationale or reasoning.

The entire comment essentially says 'nothing to see here' and positions any concern as 'unscientific' and overreaction.

You see this on HN every time in cases of nuclear power and the environment externalities. This may benefit people who make money from it but no one else and actively derails discussion and environmental concerns.

tomxor3• 7 years ago

I'm fed up of sorting and "recycling" plastic, it's such bullshit, it's a feel good activity for individuals or a check box exercise for governments. If anything it's damaging to continue pretending to recycle plastics, it makes it seem ok to continue producing them.

One day in the future it will be banned at the source, packaging will be replaced with something non-hazardous and efficient to recycle or biodegrade, and our children will look back at us in disbelief - just like we look back and scoff at advertisements for healthy smoking, yet it will have longer lasting effects on the food chain.

mediaman3• 7 years ago

As a counter-example, British Columbia recycles its post-consumer waste. There are state of the art sorting facilities near Vancouver that receive this material, sort it, grind it, clean it, and pelletize it. It's then bought and used to produce various industrial and consumer goods.

The recycler receives a subsidy (set through open bid) because the cost of sortation, grinding and cleaning is somewhat less than the recovery price of commodity resins. (Post-industrial plastics, or highly sorted plastics, are much cheaper to recycle and are processed without subsidy.)

The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false, damaging, and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics. We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

The city where I live has 14 sorts of garbage. You have to sort, clean, put it in clear special bags and write your name on it. If you don't do it right, it doesn't get removed (and your neighbours gang up to figure out who screwed it up if you don't write your name). Of course, it's Japan and people are used to following rules, but the system works quite well.

One of the things I don't like about these kinds of issues is the lack of understanding that garbage is as much a social problem as it is a technical problem. We assume that people can't/won't do things and evolve a culture where it is true.

tomxor3• 7 years ago

The idea that all plastic recycling is "pretend" recycling is false

It is a pretend _solution_ to plastic polution, because it is incomplete to say the least (like all types of recycling)... and while that is ok for other materials, it is not acceptable for plastic .

For most other recyclable materials it is merely unfortunate, a lost opportunity to reduce sourcing of virgin materials: most metals, glass, wood, cardboard, paper - if they go in the ground it is at least not toxic and even biodegradable short and long term, (and some quantity will always go in the ground, to say otherwise is wishful thinking).

, damaging and encourages adoption of environmentally damaging alternatives or use of virgin plastics.

No, the idea that it is "pretend" allows us to break the delusion that we are ever going to stop plastic pollution by recycling and move forward: acknowledging that the current solution is woefully inadequate due to the nature of the material means environmentalists and policy makers can focus their efforts on the source of the problem.

We should either use more bins and pre-sort everything (which will result in lower recycle rates, but much more economic streams) or subsidize processors to sort streams out and turn them into useful material to be re-used.

You keep doing that, for the few parts of the world that have the luxury to care about sorting their rubbish with more granularity, and can afford to actually recycle some minority of it... globally we will continue dumping vast quantities of it in the ground and ocean, the world will never be able to recycle even 50% of plastic waste (honestly 50% would be an incredible feat), so yeah... stop pretending this is going to work, if even 10% of plastics keep going in the ground each year we have failed.

Alternatively imagine what might happen if all the effort focused on attempting to recycle plastic went into forcing packaging manufacturers to switch to biodegradable alternatives. Subsidize manufacturers materials research into viable alternatives, that's an investment that will eventually eliminate plastic pollution, not just stem the flow by subsidizing plastic recycling.

TL;DR Plastic is pollution, paper isn't, keep recycling what paper we can, but don't pretend recycling plastic stops pollution. Plug the hole in the boat and stop bailing out water... otherwise we will definitely sink because the hole is much bigger than any bucket you can make.

babyslothzoo• 7 years ago

Interesting.

Meanwhile, apparently Asian countries dump more plastic into the ocean than the rest of the world combined.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asi...

gtgtgthyhy• 7 years ago

The water from my well is not very good, but ever since I got a reverse-osmosis filtration system, I probably reduced our one-time-use plastic consumption by about 95% (mainly water bottles)... and this system will pay for itself in less then one year... but of course they need to fix the packaging of many items.

baxtr• 7 years ago

Is there a good reason not to burn all the plastic instead of shipping it to foreign lands?

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

What happened before the recycling movement was that Western waste was burned in Western waste disposal facilities. This created a ton of toxic shit. Shipping it off to Asia or Africa kept our skies clear. So the recycle lie was created.

abakker• 7 years ago

What is actually produced when we burn a plastic water bottle at high temperature? I've always wondered this but never seen a great answer - are we just releasing gasses, or is the resultant ash toxic?

sitharus• 7 years ago

If the incineration happens at over 1000°C and the facility has operation exhaust gas scrubbers then not much. You'll end up with bromine, chlorine and fluorine salts in the ash.

If it's below 400° (as happens if you burn plastic in your backyard or fireplace) you'll release dioxins, which are persistent fat-accumulating toxins, and fluorine and bromide compounds which are typically bad news to anyone downwind.

It does depend on the plastic you burn though. Some are worse than others, but 1000°+ controlled incineration is typically fine for all.

pushedx• 7 years ago

I would prefer to see plastic and styrofoam containers outlawed entirely.

gingabriska• 7 years ago

I just bought 5 new Prusa i3 MK3 and I print lots of ABS and PETG parts, am I contributed to the plastic problem?

Over last 1 month, I ended up using roughly 25KG of plastic.

maccard• 7 years ago

I don't know if this is a serious question or not, but I'll assume it is - You are. Unless you're printing medical parts or repair parts to be resold, that's an enormous amount of plastic. My entire weeks worth of packaging recycling is probably only 5% of that.

That said, overall the amount is negligible compared to industrial food packaging, or industrial freight, and you'd have more of an impact by campaigning for change in those areas while waiting for your 3d printers to finish. At a certain point we're likely to enter a death by 1000 papercuts phase, and at that stage it would be irresponsible

rlpb2• 7 years ago

IMHO, while in the short term using a 3D printer may mean more plastic parts everywhere and therefore more waste, in the long term you're promoting a world of Just In Time part production where it is needed, and that future world will produce less waste.

Godel_unicode2• 7 years ago

You're forgetting that just in time means a much lower barrier between desire and realization. This can lead to a significant increase in overall consumption.

m4x• 7 years ago

You could use PLA more to reduce the impact. It's made from plant materials and is biodegradable - unfortunately it still needs to be composted correctly to fully break down, so almost all your parts will still end up contributing micro plastics to the environment.

gaze• 7 years ago

That’s an enormous amount of plastic. Yes you are.

raviolo• 7 years ago

It’s sad how the costs of dealing with used plastics - whether recycling, landfill, or something else - are usually presented as a problem. Like, “look, it’s getting too expensive to have country X take it” or “it’s not economically feasible to recycle”. I wish the costs of dealing with plastic trash went up 10 times and there was absolutely no way for anyone to avoid them. That’s the only meaningful way to get people’s attention and stop consuming 400 million tons of plastic per year.

The amount of plastic bags is ridiculous. The packaging for many products is ridiculous. I feel good about being able to put groceries into my backpack rather than plastic bags. Unfortunately I don’t have an option to take other products of their crazy layered plastic packages and put those into my backpack as well, all that packaging going straight to garbage as soon as I get home. This makes me sad.

tomohawk2• 7 years ago

Seems relevant:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64430.Bill_the_Galactic_...

throw20162• 7 years ago

A lot of assertions here about waste management and relative harmlessness of landfills.

Do you have experience or exposure to the recycling, waste management and landfill industry that you can share? Have you spoken to any landfill managers, have some idea of the volume of plastic waste and the landfill industry? Or is this just speaking from the gut?

Most articles have experts[1] and researchers[2] expressing grave concern about waste and microplastics from landfills seeping into the environment and polluting animal ecosystems and even our own water and food supply that would give anyone cause for concern. Positioning that concern as 'negative emotional reactions' without providing any science or evidence about why it is so seems unscientific in the realm of wishful thinking.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-03/documents...

[2] https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114539/Kilpone...

slavik81• 7 years ago

The Tali landfill in the second link must be very old. It seems they designed it to drain directly into the river. That's definitely not how a modern landfill is designed, and not just because of plastics.

Wikipedia seems to suggest the landfill was known as "Talinhuippu" and claims it was in use 1963–1979.

ZeroGravitas• 7 years ago

No, they're just repeating libertarian propaganda.

Libertarians hate recycling, the Dvorak keyboard and climate change because they are all popular examples of market failures.

So they've attacked them all for decades and now most American nerds will pipe up with "actually, it turns out..." and spew a bunch of lies if you bring up any of these topics and feel all pleased with themselves that they're not getting suckered like all the sheeple who believe in climate science.

It's actually got to the point were libertarian "journalists" are openly admitting that they intentio ally lied about climate change for 20 years because they didn't like the political implications.

Depressingly they're not saying this through any sense of guilt but rather a calculation that they can continue to have more influence by partially admitting but still downplaying climate change rather than blank denial.

exabrial• 7 years ago

Asia is not "taking a stand", that's quite the spin on reality. It was never economically profitable, and they tightened import controls as a pawn in the current trade war.

Coincidently: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

It's not to say that the move will undoubtedly benefit the environment, but we should call a spade a spade.

dcx• 7 years ago

Well yes, that may have been part of the calculus for China banning garbage imports. But the resulting unmet demand for garbage dumping then spread to the rest of Asia, and we absolutely are taking a stand on rejecting it for non-trade war reasons. [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.my/malaysia-town-plastic-waste-c...

deanCommie• 7 years ago

I understand the pro landfill arguments because landfills are certainly better than lugging plastic across half the planet, burning bunker fuel the whole way, only for it to get dumped into a river, and wind up essentially all back in the ocean.

But let's not pretend like landfills are an indefinite solution for humanity's problem either. Space is still finite.

toastal• 7 years ago

But actual space is basically infinite. Futurama taught me sending our garbage in a gooey mass was a good solution for our garbage problem.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

The trash comes from earth. We don't create it out of nothing. We can't overfill earth with itself.

thtthings• 7 years ago

No one's talking about the point that Western countries are exploiting poor Asian countries. They consume a lot, are a big burden on the planet and this selfishness is going to end the world

sn41• 7 years ago

India is now having a plastic recycling problem of its own. Most cities in India do not own landfills, and their surrounding villages do not want a landfill in their backyard, even if the city wants to purchase it. What's the alternative to landfilling? My ignorant guess would be to use an abandoned mine or something of the sort. Is there a sustainable waste management technique?

saravana85• 7 years ago

Actually we are too late to act on this. But its a good initiative to begin with and need more actions to save the earth.

Recently heard that Philippines govt has announced that students should plant 10 trees before they could get a degree. Creative steps like these will take us closer to create great awareness.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

Controversial but technically true point:

Plastic and paper in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.

Discuss.

Shalle135• 7 years ago

Sweden has been importing more and more trash the last decade since it ran out of it's own.

https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&ar...

agumonkey• 7 years ago

With the recent trend of stopping plastic usage, and using compost for organic waste and maybe shared glass containers too. What would still remain to dispose ? (honest question)

steve_taylor• 7 years ago

China ships us tons of plastic rubbish and we actually buy the crap, because it's cheap.

iamsb• 7 years ago

Main issue with recycling is sorting. Perhaps there are ways to solve this using technology.

superflb• 7 years ago

Less plastic consumption means less dependency on oil. Generally a good idea for all human beings. But, dominant oil companies will do anything they can to stop it.

jwillmer• 7 years ago

I watched this documentary about the world leading company in sorting all kind of waste. I'm afraid it's only available in German: https://youtu.be/6g1KNlXPbDo

Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste

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