Much US “recycling” goes straight to the landfill

https://futurism.com/plastic-recycling-landfill-greenpeace

by ppjim • 4 years ago

162 223 4 years ago

kazinator• 4 years ago

Recycling is largely a scam that was invented by the plastics industry to overcome the objections people had against single-use, disposable items.

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

This is the short and correct description of what recycling is.

It is a distraction so the packaging industry can fill the earth with garbage whilst we feel OK about it.

I'm so deeply indoctrinated to believe the recycling lie that I continue to sort my garbage despite believing it all just gets dumped into landfill.

jjtheblunt3• 4 years ago

Glass pop/soda bottles were recycled at grocery stores for decades before plastic recycling was popularized.

dsfyu404ed• 4 years ago

You're giving the plastics industry too much credit. The useful idiots who uncritically bought every word and helped them ram it down everyone's throats deserve some blame too.

standardUser2• 4 years ago

"Recycling is largely a scam"

And then you name one material that is recycled and ignore the rest, most of which are highly effective. It's called cherry-picking and it's a bad look.

maxbond2• 4 years ago

Tangential meta-commentary on a phrase I'm seeing more often that I don't think is effective; "it's a bad look" is not a criticism, unless you can explain why a position being perceived poorly implies that it without merit in this particular circumstance. Most of the time, it is not an opinion worth sharing. For instance, this comment would have been a more effective argument if it simply stated that materials other than plastic could be recycled well. The addition of "it's a bad look" only adds snark which distracts from the point being made and makes the discussion needlessly contentious.

res0nat0r• 4 years ago

Frontline did a documentary about this a while back. Your plastic fruit container may have "3" on it with the recycle symbol, which means it can go to a facility that can recycle that grade of plastic, but that doesn't mean your city / state has a facility that can process that, or will spend the money to build such a facility.

It was a move from the plastics industry to push a feel-good policy, but is likely not doing as much good as many of us think.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/

lotsofpulp• 4 years ago

Voters wanted a feel good policy too, so it worked for politicians and basically everyone. Even today, no one is going to get elected by telling constituents they need to consume less and lower their quality of life.

baggy_trough• 4 years ago

We'll all be better off if we stop doing performative environmentalism by pretending that recycling helps.

squokko• 4 years ago

I always suspected this, because given what I know of the average American, there's no chance that the recycling bins aren't full of all kinds of nonrecyclable items. The only things that I expect are reliably recycled are those which are profitable enough to pick out of the mess.

ROTMetro4• 4 years ago

Dude, it is disgusting what people put in recycling. I think people may be trying to sabotage it the stuff they put in there. Lots of used kitty litter. Lots of soiled clothes. Worst thing we had come through was a human body.

swagasaurus-rex4• 4 years ago

wow tell us more about this recycled human body

mateo411• 4 years ago

Worst thing we had come through was a human body.

This should really go in the compost bin.

otikik4• 4 years ago

Perhaps it was all plastic surgery offshoots.

c22• 4 years ago

I was working at a fast food restaurant, emptying the trash cans several times a day, when my city decided to mandate separate recycle and compost bins in dining areas. It tripled the number of cans I had to empty and clean out, but they all ended up in the same garbage dumpster. Some of my coworkers didn't give a fuck but I couldn't in good conscience dump a bin full of half-empty milkshakes and chewing gum into the recycling dumpster, or a bunch of foil wrappers and plastic bottles into the compost.

null_object• 4 years ago

In 2020 only 10% of plastic was recycled in Sweden. [0]

The rest was burnt to produce heating and electricity - which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants.

Not just a US problem.

[0] in Swedish: https://www.ivl.se/press/nyheter/2020-02-21-lattlast-rapport...

ars12• 4 years ago

which releases an enormous amount of CO2 gases and other pollutants.

No it does not. This is simply untrue.

Burning plastic does not release pollutants, and the CO2 released just replaces CO2 released from burning other fuel (oil, natural gas, etc).

It's a 100% win, and every country should copy them.

saddlerustle• 4 years ago

In terms of CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas (and much much worse than any zero carbon source). Energy is fungible, there's no reason to encourage producing CO2 when it's possible not to.

mrinterweb3• 4 years ago

Burning plastic does not release pollutants

Very false

otikik4• 4 years ago

It's a 100% win,

A 100% win would be not producing the plastics in the first place in order to not have this problem, and then producing heat via a renewable source.

Everything below that is less of a 100% win.

Burning plastic does not release pollutants

That is strictly false. It depends on the plastic. "Dioxins are just one of the many harmful emissions from incinerators. They are highly toxic and can cause cancer and damage to the immune system"

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/incineration-burning-plas....

ars12• 4 years ago

This is supposed to be a surprise?

It's very simple: If you have to pay to recycle things, it's a failure. If they pay you, it works.

China used to buy plastic recycling from the US (it was never just shipped for disposal, China actually paid for it). For a while they actually wanted it because they could use it to make new stuff. But it become uneconomical (too labor intensive), and they stopped.

Metal: You have people hunting for metal, and going through bins for it. i.e. it's good to recycle.

Cardboard: Same thing.

Everything else? Don't recycle it. Burn the plastic for energy, and bury everything else. Sweden actually buys garbage from other countries to burn for energy. Since they are paying for the item, this works just fine.

vegetable• 4 years ago

Some more relevant information in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g Wendover Productions - How China broke the world's recycling

Dylan168077• 4 years ago

Do you mean: if I need to pay but don't pay?

I don't see why paying wouldn't work.

rjh29• 4 years ago

In the UK too there's been a lot of news on this:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plast...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/16/uk-ewast...

https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exp...

Basically recycling companies pay to export the waste to poor countries who simply dump or burn it instead of recycling it.

For this reason I avoid plastic and stick to cardboard, glass and aluminium. Fortunately plastic is extremely unfashionable in the UK right now and products are increasingly switching to card or aluminium instead.

legitster• 4 years ago

If only!

Western landfills are amazing technology that affordably and safely lock away garbage. Most of the land can be reclaimed for parks or golf courses or other public spaces.

Recycling programs often end in plastics being sent to Asian landfills which are little more than open dumps susceptible to rain, flooding, and contributing to the Pacific garbage patch.

freedomben• 4 years ago

I'd be very interested in a source to read/watch/learn more about landfill tech if anybody knows of a good one

kfarr• 4 years ago

Also interested if there is any recent work on micro reclamation of discarded high value materials. Probably drinking too much sci Fi cool aid but seems like landfills may someday be a treasure for mining once the tech is capable

olivermarks• 4 years ago

The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports. 'Recycling' was a euphemism for offshoring garbage whether plastic bottles or solar panels, but now the Chinese have tightened their standards.

2017 film 'Plastic China' trailer

https://youtu.be/jnNNnHTLjmg

gruez4• 4 years ago

The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports

Are we talking about actual slavery, or run of the mill "developing country with poor labor standards"?

otikik4• 4 years ago

The US doesn't have great labor standards either. ~800000 US citizens are slaves in all but name.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...

rootw0rm• 4 years ago

China does indeed have poor labor standards. However, Chinese factories aren't really forced to uphold their minimal standards.

Here's an article from a week ago:

https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/shein-is-treating-workers-eve...

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

Lots of talk about blaming recycling programs. But the OP as I understand it, shows that people are not even bothering to put but 5% of their plastic in the recycle bin to begin with!

nickpinkston3• 4 years ago

Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.

Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.

While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

kylehotchkiss2• 4 years ago

Since you mention it, there's a surprising effort to remove plastic from the ocean too: https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-... It's definitely a drop in the bucket, but a nice improvement over the we-can't-do-anything attitude previously on the pacific garbage patch

acchow• 4 years ago

well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.

On the other hand, a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on pace to run out of room in landfills within 18 years"

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-landfills-are-fi...

So which is it?

Baader-Meinhof3• 4 years ago

I think that is just referring to the existing landfills. We can/do build new landfills all the time. And there is no shortage of unused space for new landfills.

gonzo41• 4 years ago

It's always a willpower issue. If the US needed a fighter bomber range it could find the land etc etc.

Whilst the US has a lot of people. its also really big. It's got space to solve this problem.

Tycho• 4 years ago

That’s so obviously not true. Come on.

golemotron• 4 years ago

a quick Google search turns up quotes like "the US is on pace to run out of room in landfills within 18 years"

People talk about fake news, but this sort of stuff (which is fake news also) damages credibility immensely.

strken• 4 years ago

When you run out of space in a landfill you send some engineers and excavator operators out and dig a new one. The three reasons not to do that, as given by your article, are (paraphrasing) "permits and environmental regulations take a long time," "communities don't like it," and "it's bad for the environment."

If the rubbish starts piling up, in the US or elsewhere, then all three of those issues are going to be quickly ignored in favour of digging another hole and adding the bare minimum of leachate collection.

whywhywhydude• 4 years ago

Your comment makes me wonder if people just haven’t had a chance to travel within the US. Except for the coastal cities, for the most part, US is empty.

gruez4• 4 years ago

Probably the former, given the hysteria about running out of landfill space was partially the reason why there was a push to recycle in the 80s.

GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge.
KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more.
[...]
GONZALEZ: OK. Here's what else was happening at the time. Yes, landfills were closing, but that was because there were new rules for landfills - stricter rules to protect the environment. The EPA said you now have to do things like line the bottom of landfills with plastic so they don't contaminate the groundwater.
KINNAMAN: And so the old town dump - every little town had one - was out of compliance. You can't accept garbage in here anymore. It's illegal. And so these town dumps were closing by the dozens.
GONZALEZ: But in their place, regional landfills were becoming a thing - bigger landfills that could accept trash while still following all of these new rules. The Natural Resources Defense Council says there used to be about 10,000 dumps in the mid-'80s and that now we have less than 3,000. But we were not running out of space then, and we still aren't running out of space. Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered.
KINNAMAN: And so the recycling era was born. This is when state government said, we're going to require cycling to - recycling to occur.

olyjohn• 4 years ago

I was just in Thailand... where you can't drink the water. So you buy plastic water bottles constantly. All the rivers and waterways are just full of plastic bottles floating everywhere.

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

Are reusable bottles and home water filters a bridge too far?

blackoil• 4 years ago

Normally, homes have water purifiers or get large reused bottles. Small bottles are used by tourist/travellers. Though, yeah waste segregation and disposal is a problem.

thwayunion7• 4 years ago

Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.

I guess this depends on your tax bracket and political bargaining power. I grew up smelling (and smelling like) solid waste trucked in from the waste treatment facility for the richer suburbs in a racially segregated metro area. The less PC way of sating that is "concentrated rich 95% white person shit".

And let me tell you: despite what they think, MD/JD/MBA shit does not smell like roses. The smell permeated the entire community for days at a time, every month. I also now have a whole set of recommended annual cancer screenings. All from a modern and well regulated landfill that is still in operation.

I shit you not: we had movie days in high school that corresponded with the worse smelling days. Just whole days/weeks of lost learning, regularly, because the whole place smelled like literal human shit.

Now I live in a snow white upper middle class suburb and those problems are behind me, but I'm still very conscious about where my waste really ends up and have gone to war in more than city council meeting about where our literal shit ends up.

But, again, if you have a FAANG salary then your shit and trash will be shipped to someone else's community and it's not your problem. Waste away! /s

jjtheblunt3• 4 years ago

Ironically, I think the G in FAANG is built on the landfill of San Francisco from a far more toxic era, which is, to your point, sad.

nickpinkston3• 4 years ago

I lived near waste center myself (sewage treatment plant in Bayview SF) with all the smells it emitted, but I'm still really glad it exists!

It definitely should be regulated to not offgas like that, but we can/should solve those problems. It wouldn't even be that hard - probably like $10-50M or so.

We need to address the lack of true democratic representation in those communities allows those problems to persist. It's not because of lack of tech or finance.

kotlin2• 4 years ago

That’s a solvable problem though. Regulations could be changed to require more buffer areas for the landfill.

Also, another thing to think about it is that your parents likely picked the best place available for their means. Not many people choose to live next to landfills if they can afford something better. Had the landfill not existed, your parents would have likely needed to live next to some other type of hazard. It’s unfortunate, but a reality of our economic system.

civilized• 4 years ago

If the MBAs send all the stinky stuff to the compost rather than the landfill, it's still going to offend someone.

unnamed76ri2• 4 years ago

And I’d be willing to bet that the cities that exist like this are controlled by one political party and the population happily keeps voting to keep them in power.

sparrc• 4 years ago

Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.

That reference isn't exactly justifying your statement. AFAICT that research is just comparing the relative amounts of plastic going to the ocean _from rivers_. Rivers are not the only way that plastic gets into the ocean.

Most of the ocean plastic is actually from fishing gear...so if you want to reduce ocean plastics your best bet is probably to stop eating so much fish: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/great-pac...

lm28469• 4 years ago

Rich countries aren't really the problem.

Eh, we ship a lot of waste overseas and we delocalised a lot of industries there too. Rich countries are definitely part of the problem, it's too easy to say we don't have a role in this and point our fingers to Asia and Africa... it's time to start taking responsabilities

bluquark• 4 years ago

The illegally dumped plastic fishing gear also comes from countries with poorly-monitored fishing industries, so the same basic dynamic applies.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

The 2018 Scientific American article states that "more than a quarter" comes from ten rivers in Asia. That means more than half, at least 2/3, comes from somewhere else.

The following year, in 2019, The Guardian stated that Greenpeace said most ocean pollution comes from "ghost gear", dumped fishing gear, not rivers in Asia.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...

OrangeMonkey• 4 years ago

Our straws were stolen by fools crying over turtles who shipped our "recycling" to third world countries, who threw it in the gd rivers.

Its all so tiring.

garren• 4 years ago

Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.

I don't have a source for this, so take it for what it's worth, but as I recall rich countries remain a significant part of the problem. TFA mentions it, but, iirc, the US used to ship its plastic waste to China for recycling, but the "single stream" approach to recycling resulted in a contaminated waste stream that was more expensive to handle. So China stopped accepting our recyclable waste. In turn, we started shipping our recyclables to Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries instead. They're happy for the business, but they don't have the infra to handle the amount of waste we're sending, and general mismanagement is widely recognized [0]. As a result US plastic waste intended for "recycling" ends up in dump sites, landfills, etc. in SEA countries and eventially accumulates in rivers, sewers, and eventually the ocean.

I don't disagree with you regarding landfills. There was a post here recently that seemed to lean more towards just throwing plastic away, that way it ends up in a landfill, rather than "recycling" it and having it end up in the ocean by way of the Philippines

[0] https://www.pemsea.org/publications/reports/reducing-plastic...

edgefield• 4 years ago

I don’t think you know what your talking about. For instance, Victoria BC, the capital of British Columbia, Canada, didn’t have a waste sewage plant for the city until 2021. I’m quite sure many rich countries are still significantly polluting the land, sea, and air.

Ptchd2• 4 years ago

Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.

A lot of the problematic plastic comes from fishing.

celestialcheese2• 4 years ago

"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wanted to acknowledge it because they spent decades training the population that recycling is important and they didn't want to undo those years of hard work.

It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream.

Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath.

Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers.

Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword 2 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycli...

mwint2• 4 years ago

Huh, this is an interesting question I’ve never thought of: Why wouldn’t it always be more efficient to do single-stream recycling, with giant blue bins for people to throw recyclable stuff in, and have manual sorting at facilities?

If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?

yostrovs• 4 years ago

When people throw paper, beer cans with some beer left over and other bottles together, the paper becomes soiled and useless. Glass breaks during loading/unloading of the truck and can't be separated out anymore. So the problem is that you have to separate initially.

nico2• 4 years ago

On the same line, isn’t it also more expensive for humanity as a whole to keep throwing stuff away just to make and buy more?

nostrademons4• 4 years ago

Single-stream recycling was basically a greenwashing scam enabled by the ability of supply chains to hide where the product ends up. The plastics weren't being recycled; they were being shipped to China, where peasant children would sift through them for anything of value and the rest would be left in the fields. I'd recommend the documentary "Plastic China" for an expose on that; it's the reason that the Chinese government has banned new garbage imports:

https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina

I highly suspect that recycling is in fact a terrible economic idea, and it's not at all cost effective to have people sort their garbage so it can be recovered for materials worth pennies anyway. The problem is that you cannot generally tell civilized affluent consumers that their consumption habits are going to turn this planet into the world of Wall-E, without them insisting we do something about this. The real product being sold was the myth of a sustainable future, just as it is with most other industries.

celestialcheese2• 4 years ago

Contamination is an issue - another comment mentioned beer in the paper, and that's pretty accurate. You get paid based on the quality of material you can send to your downstream buyers, single stream stock has significantly more contamination from poorly cleaned containers on average than multi-stream.

But another part is just the sheer volume of material. There's no time to do manual sorting other than basic visual inspection to make sure things like bowling balls and concrete get to the sorters.

Optical sorters are incredibly cool, but only just now getting to a place where they can work fast enough and accurate enough to make a difference [3]. Separating the material apart gives the machines the best shot at sorting; less work they'll need to do. Even if humans only get 80% of the sorting right at collection, it's significantly better than no sorting at all, as it gives the machines time to pick and blow the material to proper channels for recovery and resale.

See [1] [2] for videos of NYC recycling plants to see the scale. Videos don't do it justice, and when you tour different plants, it puts the complexity of the problem into perspective.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivu0HCdqEHs 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHGKZL8_6Q 3 - https://www.recyclingproductnews.com/article/35841/the-lates...

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 4 years ago

Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem

No, it boils down to companies actually putting in some goddamned effort to use actually fucking recyclable and recycled materials. Anything else is a goddamned side show.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe

A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't.

According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.…
China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged…
“After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said.

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article...

anm89• 4 years ago

Throw your plastics directly in the trash. This way you will be honest with yourself about where your plastic is going and maybe use marginally less.

The truth is though that if you aren't growing your own food and making your own household items, you are pretty much signed up to create large volumes of plastic waste in a way that is mostly out of your control.

mrinterweb3• 4 years ago

Placing blame and responsibility on consumers to not purchase single-use plastic is not the right approach. Discouraging the use of single-use plastics should be done at government policy level to heavily tax the sale of single-use plastics, and subsidize sustainable alternatives.

swagasaurus-rex4• 4 years ago

Prices may increase but imagine how much more competitive American or European manufacturing could be if the cheapest materials (and incidentally most environmentally harmful) were taxed appropriately.

There’s a cycle of waste where cheap goods break but its okay because its cheap. Instead we could be making things that last.

thrown_223• 4 years ago

Building products that last as long as possible is a sure fire way to destroy your market.

You can't both build things that can be infinitely fixable and sell a steady stream of them.

sublinear• 4 years ago

I agree that this isn't the consumer's problem, but I don't agree government policy or taxes incentivize anything but fraud. Do we really need even more government contractors?

samtho• 4 years ago

Taxes are basically a shortcut to adjusting market forces to result in a more desirable behavior. Fraud is possible only if the incentive is poorly aligned with the result, allowing people to take advantage of an alternate, but easier, action to benefit from the program. Lawmakers who give in to the demands of special interests will inevitably create these loopholes, it does not happen in a vacuum.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

Product manufacturers should have to bear the cost of disposing the products/packaging they ship. It would be great if every product came stamped with some manufacturer ID code or something, and when you throw it away, the waste management company eventually scans it all and each manufacturer got billed based on material/weight/etc.

Baader-Meinhof3• 4 years ago

Manufacturers would just transfers to the consumer. We have a CRV tax for each bottle/can here in California, and as far as I can tell, it has no affect on consumer behavior.

hinkley3• 4 years ago

I think you can go farther than this that it's in the interests of industry to deflect blame to individual citizens because it distracts from the fact that big problems need to be solved at choke-points, and manufacturing is one of the biggest ones we have.

opportune• 4 years ago

Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with?

Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them.

Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient).

I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.

alistairSH2• 4 years ago

Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery.

Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.

enragedcacti• 4 years ago

FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container.

https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/gl...

unnamed76ri2• 4 years ago

Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor.

When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?

Bedon2923• 4 years ago

Prince William did the same with Glass. But also only takes 1 and 2 plastic now.

My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.

briHass2• 4 years ago

Agreed. I feel like I live in crazy land, when there's so much focus on banning plastic straws and bags. Then, only to replace them with paper straws coated with (likely) some horrific chemical that still fall apart or 'reusable' shopping bags that take 50x the amount of plastic/energy to manufacture and then take extra energy to clean.

People could do far more to 'save the planet' by keeping their house at 65F in the Winter and 78F in the Summer, but that doesn't have the same virtuous feel as campaigning to ban 'evil' single-use plastics. Nobody will see you shiver/sweat in your house, so there's nothing to brag about.

lupire3• 4 years ago

What are you doing to make your reusable bags dirty? They carry mostly packaged goods.

NovaVeles• 4 years ago

Back in 1989 - Dow Chemcial made a proposal. Even then, there was too many plastic type to sort out and contamination was a major issue. They had a realistic but somewhat defeatist solution. Just burn it all. Use it for heat and power, treat plastic as an intermediate step of oil and nothing more. Then figure out emissions capture technology so that it can be stored somehow.

I don't agree with it entirely but I did like that it was an realistic approach to a complex problem.

pfdietz3• 4 years ago

It's a form of energy storage, helpful for seasonal load leveling, or perhaps production of synfuels.

kylehotchkiss2• 4 years ago

Keeping it isolated to its own landfill might prove better than mixing it if plastic eating bacteria tech continues to innovate: https://www.livescience.com/plastic-eating-bacteria

insane_dreamer2• 4 years ago

Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills.

Recycling plastic is a non-solution to a much bigger problem: over-consumption of plastics.

The only way I see forward is for governments to implement policies that discourage use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers. Some places have done this with plastic bags, but need to do it for plastic single-use bottles, etc.

diebeforei4852• 4 years ago

There should be some sort of tax on plastic bottles with less than half gallon (~ 2 liters) of liquid in them.

hinkley3• 4 years ago

The ghost of Wilford Brimley has entered the chat.

Diabetus.

Baader-Meinhof3• 4 years ago

Plastic bags are unfairly maligned:

- They are often quite economically produced, and only require a small amount of plastic.

- They are likely reused, often as trash can liners.

- As long as we bury them in appropriate landfills, then the carbon in the bag goes back into the ground. (See other comments on the myth of landfill space running out.)

- Manufacturing cloth tote bags has a carbon footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climat...

- Furthermore, cloth tote bags hold bacteria and are unhygienic for carrying groceries. Washing the bags cost electricity/water and probably not carbon neutral either.

insane_dreamer2• 4 years ago

Some fair points. However, many (most?) reusable grocery bags these days are made from jute, or a mix of jute and cotton, not cotton. Jute is much more environmentally friendly than cotton, and it can be rough so minimally processed. We're not talking about those highly-processed fashion cotton bags (that don't really replace plastic bags). Some cloth bags are made with plastic, which is still better than single-use plastic bags (esp since one of those larger tote bags, like the kind at Trader Joe's replaces 4-5 of those plastic bags that supermarkets would bag your groceries in.

It's also not about how much plastic is used to create the plastic bags, it's how much environmental pollution is created from the bags.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

They are likely reused, often as trash can liners.

Indeed, I don't know anyone who doesn't reuse the free plastic bags they get from stores, even if it's only a single reuse.

The other thing to note is that plastic bags are naturally waterproof. You can even wash (more like rinse) them if you so desire, but they also don't tend to attract dirt, unlike the woven types.

teeray• 4 years ago

The reusable bags have a serious UX problem too. I have to buy as many reusable bags as my largest grocery order ever. Next, I have to carry all those empty bags with me throughout the store. Then, I have to launder my bags to get the inevitable nasty grossness out of them.

I wish they had a propane tank model instead: I buy reusable bag credits. At the checkout, my items are bagged from a supply of clean reusable bags, and that number is deducted from my credits (if I need more, I can instantly buy them). When I return to the store, I bring my bags back to the bag return where the bags will be laundered in bulk in commercial machines.

throwawaylinux• 4 years ago

It's really about the pinnacle of uninformed virtue signaling that does more harm than good. But it's okay because you got to say you were wonderful for being willing to sacrifice so much, and call anybody who disagreed or tried to have a rational discussion about the actual numbers an anti-The Science™ bootlicker for big plastic bag.

Dylan168077• 4 years ago

It's important to look at the actual study.

Organic cotton bags have some kind of footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag.

For climate impact specifically, you have to reuse a cotton bag 52 times. And an organic cotton bag 149 times. The really big numbers are based on things like ozone impact and fertilizer runoff, which are worth considering but should be taken in comparison with daily life and not just plastic bags.

gruez4• 4 years ago

Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills.

Source? My impression was that china was buying the recycling from us[1]. Sure, some of that was not recycleable and ended up getting burned/landfilled/dumped in a river, but they weren't intending on just landfilling it.

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/741283641

berjin• 4 years ago

Not everyone will care about environmental affects so it's important to mention the health crisis. Plastics, and associated chemicals like pthlates and PFOAs, that are also terrible for our health; reproductive health in particular. Scientists like Shanna Swan are blaming plastics for declining sperm counts and boys having less masculine features than in older generations. It goes way beyond BPA as the replacement chemicals for "BPA free" products are innocent until proven to be unsafe. Even tea bags are fully of plastic. It's a minefield trying to avoid it. I'd really like plastics to be banned at least for single use packaging initially.

fmajid2• 4 years ago

Recycling plastic is a greenwashing con that is designed to deflect from citizens demanding a reduction in the use of plastics.

At this point, there is pretty much only one material that is actually recycled, because it is easy and profitable to do so: aluminum. We should eb enouraging manufacturers to adopt either aluminum or cardboard for all their packaging (the latter is not recyclable in practice, but at least is sequesters carbon). By encourage, I mean ban plastic packaging outright or impose draconian taxes on it.

nostrademons4• 4 years ago

Steel as well. The big integrated U.S. steelmakers like U.S. Steel went bankrupt because most steel today is no longer produced from iron ore. Rather, something like 80% of the steel produced today is made by melting down scrap steel in electric arc furnaces, which is a completely different technology & supply chain stack.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

In large part, that's due to the fact that China stopped importing plastic waste back in 2018, causing a massive pile up in western countries.

I don't think so, I've seen reports that most plastic waste sent to China wound up in landfills or incinerators too. So it's actually probably a net improvement to not spend all that energy sending it 7000 miles to China to put it in a landfill.

It's been a fiction all along, we just paid China to make it easier for us to pull the wool over our own eyes. Or, even more cycnically, to get it into their landfills or incinerated air pollution instead of ours.

jh00ker• 4 years ago

This is so disheartening. I subscribed to and helped perpetuate The Lie. Damn.

While we're on this topic, does anyone have info regarding what happens to the plastic bags I return to my local (CA, US) grocery store collection bin? Are they part of a separate stream?

I add all sorts of used plastic bags to that bin (thin produce bags, the more heavy-duty grocery bags, Amazon padded shipping envelopes, deflated shipping air bags, clean zip lock bags, etc.). I also wonder if I'm gumming up the works by putting different types of plastic bags in the bin because most bags don't have recycle markings/numbers.

NickRandom• 4 years ago

Sadly, almost certainly. The results of your action is that the entire load is rejected as mixed waste and sent to landfill rather than being able to be recycled so although your intentions are good, the end result is far worse than if you didn't do it all.

Bedon2923• 4 years ago

Yes, thin plastic bags are very bad for typical processing machines. They take them at grocery stores so they can be a different stream. Although I have my doubts that much recycling is actually done with them there too.

Putting things in recycling that aren't explicitly accepted by your local facility is bad. Never put things in that aren't marked, and definitely not thin unmarked stuff. It increase the costs by gumming up processing equipment if they try to do something with it. And likely does just shunt the whole section over to the landfill. Although most of the stuff probably ends up there anyways. Same thing with greasy pizza boxes, they just taint the load.

not2b• 4 years ago

The article is specifically about plastic waste. A considerably higher proportion of glass, metal, and paper is successfully recycled, not all of it, but value is extracted and reused.

Ptchd2• 4 years ago

Do you really save energy by recycling paper?

js2• 4 years ago

Concurrent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33314434

userbinator2• 4 years ago

I wonder how long it will be until landfills become valuable mines. A lot of materials in them may certainly be reused again in the future. After all, everything is "recycling" on a long-enough timescale... and the fact that the stuff in landfills has already been processed once may be advantageous from the perspective of needing less processing when it's mined again, compared to something like crude oil.

fencepost2• 4 years ago

It's not shocking if you understand some of what's involved.

For glass, there are lots of different chemical compositions related to color, hardness and other physical and chemical properties, plus all the contamination with other materials like labels. You can't just throw it all into a big furnace and get anything except low quality glass with inclusions - and there's no market for that. Heck, ask glass blowers what COE they use and if you can bring your own colors in.

Paper has a lot of the same issue, cleaning it isn't worth what you can get from it. I would guess that we might see an increase in some sort of biological breakdown of it in the future, BUT that might end up releasing a lot more carbon than simply sequestering it in landfills.

I suspect that we'll see big improvement in plastics in the coming decades with better breakdown and separation options, but even there contamination will be a big problem.

Metals are about the only thing really practical to recycle, at least given current prices for them.

pfdietz3• 4 years ago

Here's a 12 minute walk through a glass recycling facility and a nearby facility that turns the cullet into blow-in fiberglass insulation. Quite interesting. There's an optical sorter that excludes brown glass and ceramic pieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR9FtWVjk2c

fencepost2• 4 years ago

Nice and informative video! My exposure to glass has mostly been working with someone doing glass blowing and hot glass work, so even the clean cullet from the recycling process would likely not be good enough there - it needs basically zero contaminants, because just one or two little dark spots in the clear part of a paperweight can be a problem.

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

Why can't we burn plastic for energy?

_carbyau_• 4 years ago

We've recently had another bin added for compost. Now it's Recycle, Compost, Garbage.

This upset me so much as it is very clear that there is no mature recycling industry and it's getting worse.

A mature recycling industry could just take "rubbish" as a single output, sort it efficiently and get on with things. Get money for taking your rubbish. Get money for selling recycled output.

Everyone has experienced the "outsource it to the masses so we don't have to cover the expense of doing it".

What happened to "efficiency of expertise" and "economies of scale" ?

ROTMetro4• 4 years ago

Fun fact. The recycling plant I worked at would buy and mix in new cardboard with our recycled cardboard because we couldn't get the contamination rate to an acceptable level without blending.

pfdietz3• 4 years ago

When we get off of fossil fuels, the economy will have a shortage of cheap reduced carbon. At that point, plastic can be recycled not as plastic, but as a carbon source. It'll be vigorously thermally processed to get small molecules out that can be dealt with like fossil fuels currently are.

pencilguin• 4 years ago

I used to think that failing to recycle plastic was fine, because plastic in landfills is carbon sequestered. If not made into plastic, that same carbon would be burned and enter the atmosphere.

Then I found out that, for each carbon bound up in a piece of plastic, a half-dozen are released to the atmosphere in doing that. Thus, for each bit of plastic not recycled, so much more is made from scratch, and that much more CO2 enters the atmosphere. (Presumably, recycling involves energetic processing, but less.) In the future, when the energy used in processing comes more from renewables, will balances shift?

Shale oil, by the way, is equally evil. For each carbon extracted and delivered, four or five are burnt in extracting it.

Trias11• 4 years ago

I wonder if truth about recycling is such a politically incorrect subject similar to profiling of a typical criminal in a specific city/state?

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

Moat of plastic recycling is focused on heating up and melting down thermoplastics. I've been wondering if there is another way. Like dissolving the plastics into solvents, then distilling and separating the different compounds in the solution, then pull out thr solvents in a recoverable way, then one would be left with pure compounds. It seems like the science and tech for this exists now, we just need to industrialized it and make it profitable to do so. Not unlike distilling organic compounds like we do today on a commercial scale.

pabs3• 4 years ago

Perhaps we should require all manufacturers of physical products to have cradle-to-grave lifecycle planning for their products. The supermarket should accept discarded containers from consumers, the tomato soup company should accept discarded cans from supermarkets and the can manufacturers should accept discarded cans from them. Pretty soon you will have reusable containers for almost everything.

tb_technical• 4 years ago

The only way to improve this metric is to subsidize green recycling industries, and to provide abundant and cheap energy for the process to occur.

Much US “recycling” goes straight to the landfill

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