Automated recycling is coming along well. Here's a typical modern plant in the UK.[1] Sorting is mechanized, with tumble drums, vibratory sorters, and magnets doing most of the work. Permanent magnets pull ferrous metal out. AC magnets pull aluminum out. Vision systems, often multispectral, look at the presorted materials as they go by on a fast belt and use air jets to kick out certain types of items. This is standard technology.
There's still some manual picking involved in most plants. Robots are taking that over at a few plants.[2]
Aluminum is the moneymaker. Plastic bottles can go to a plant that turns them back into pellets for making new bottles.[3] A huge plant now serves southern California. Not clear this makes money.
Waste paper isn't that valuable. "Peak paper" was a while back, and US paper mills have been closing for years. It's not that sorting is hard, it's that the product is so low-value.
Plain white office paper might not be so valuable, but cardboard remains valuable enough that in Eastern Europe you can see marginalized communities like the Roma collecting it daily. I have seen recycling centers advertise payments like 0.50€/kg in exchange for cardboard, which seems pretty high.
We still burn tens of millions of tonnes of essentially recyclable material that isn't recycled thanks to market prices.
The burning isn't relevant (it's better than landfill in a lot of circumstances), it's that introducing virgin materials to the waste pool is cheaper than reuse, for many materials.
When my kids were young, they went on a field trip to a recycling plant. As a parent, the most interesting discovery was the sorting facility we visited didn't sort plastic by type because you can't expect people earning minimum wage to sort LDPE from HDPE from etc. So what did the big commercial recycling facility do? They sorted plastic by shape. Things shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as trash, things not shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as recyclable. It was pretty clear at that point recycling plastic was just a for show activity.
But plastic is effectively recycled in lots of places in the world. Just because that plant sucked it doesn't mean all do. Add to that the commercial plastic waste, pallet wrap for instance is already separated when it is sold to the recyclers.
Better than all that of course is re-use. When I was a child, in the UK, large glass bottles of lemonade had a 20p deposit, refundable on return. I believe I believe it is still common in Germany. This went away in the UK because large super-markets didn't want the hassle of dealing with returns, IIRC
It complicates transportation to sell all goods in bulk. I'm glad that stores don't charge an extra 1.5 cents for the plastic bag around every gallon of milk and pound of rice.
You, yourself, might have enough responsibility and self-control to prioritize cleaning your containers, but this is not true for all humans. The store would lose business if their competitor sold milk already in bags or boxes, but you had to bring your own milk bag to their store. And someone's bags might have bacterial or other contaminants and get them sick, then they blame the store and get the health department to shut them down. (Tangent: Why is most milk still sold in boxes, and not in plastic?)
Glass is fragile, metals cause unexpected chemical reactions, wood is permeable & requires additional materials (wax, glue) to seal properly, and cardboard has poor durability.
I think he might be referencing things like shrink wrapped banannas, or plastic boxes around Tupperware containers, or when you buy a bag of something and every single individual piece has it's own wrapping inside the bag.
There is a lot of completely unnecessary packaging that companies use because it gets them a 0.02% increase in profit and they don't have to pay the actual costs of the plastic pollution they are creating
There’s not going to be one solution to all things. That’s a strawman argument.
I’m for allowing for ways to not use so much plastic. The technology exists - for instance, the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me one at a time and at the time they leave their container. It’d take take some doing, but it’s doable. For people not willing or able to provide a container then sell them the old plastic covered cubes of oatmeal in boxes two at a time. And charge them more.
> the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me one at a time and at the time they leave their container.
The Internet of Things can help this to become a reality, with sensors on the box lid and an internet connection. Why charge a customer only once when you can charge them twice?
When you buy the box of oatmeal cubes, you're buying the right to buy oatmeal cubes. When you remove them from the container is when you actually purchase the cubes.
Similar to a Costco card, or buying a phone to access apps in the app store.
Exactly. In the UK right now there is a push to sell wine and gin in plastic kegs. Take your own bottle and fill up for less. Packaging these products in bulk significantly simplifies distribution and reduces cost.
Exactly. Supermarket have added a lot of plastic packaging supposedly for our 'convenience', like adding separator sheets between slices of cheese, or strawberries in a plastic container instead of the cardboard they used to be packaged with (so you can judge the quality better?).
Or the convenience of the cashier, so they can see you packed the right vegetables in the sack.
And probably they use plastics instead of paper because its cheaper, and they can scrape a penny off the price.
A lot of the power on what packaging is used is still in the consumer's hands, though. Just don't buy those cookies that are individually wrapped.
You might not see the container cost on the receipt but the balance is there. The balance to society to clean up your spent containers are not on your bill. Tell me how you’d solve that problem without generic containers and then I’ll entertain your suggestion(s).
What would the dairy do if someone broke a glass bottle - who pays for it? What if some ignoble soul starts stealing these glass bottles from customer porches to get recycling money for them?
i'd really like amazon to get rid of all possible packaging. I wonder if Walmart, Target and Amazon could agree to only sell products without cosmetic packaging, or upcharge for them, if that would make a dent or just a drop in the bucket...
I've always thought we should put responsibility of recycling on the seller, the incentive is not there for them unless they have to manage the waste. Walmart should have giant bins that accept our product packaging waste: styrofoam, plastics, cellophane, all of it goes to a single bin, and now they have to sort and recycle it. Then the incentive would change. Maybe we can't do it with bins, but a recycle Tax paid directly by the marketing assholes.
It wouldn't take long for Walmart to start demanding more simpler recyclable paper packaging over plastic if they took responsibility for the waste they generate for their packaging.
> Alvarado and Sanchez were arrested and charged with felony recycling fraud, attempted grand theft, filing a false or forged document, and conspiracy, officials said.
Efficient plastic recycling is very hard to do cost-efficiently due to the many types of plastic that are typically mixed together. But there is much research and innovation in this field.
One method that looks quite promising in this regard is Magnetic Density Separation (MDS) under development at Technical University Delft:
It's worth remembering Recycling is the least good thing we should be doing.
1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
I always find it interesting in developing countries to see tons and tons of stuff being reused, way more than in Developed countries. i.e. A 1 liter beer bottle in Ecuador is $0.75 for the beer, and $1 deposit on the glass. The bottles are cleaned and reused hundreds of times.
Yes, by far! Everyone fixated on recycling because it was the only option that didn’t require people to make real changes in their lives (and it’s amazing how much resistance there is/was to simply putting things in a few different bins). Now that China has decided to no longer be the world’s garbage dump, those chickens are going to come home to roost real quick.
I'm very disappointed that in France, it's illegal to take things out of a déchetterie (scrapyard). They have fences and video cameras, and report offenders to the police.
The policies are actively hostile to repairing and reusing old products, e.g. computers, printers.
But dont forget developing countries also USE less.
Eventually when their standard of living improves, so will their consumption.
In any scenario, homo economicus will weigh the cost of reusing something, vs the convenience of using that mental space and time for something else which makes him/her happier.
If the convenience is high enough, people will switch to the other product.
This doesnt happen now, because costs are still prohibitive.
But do note, that in India they pioneered the single use plastic package for clothing detergents. So now where people sold a whole box of detergent, there are now thousands upon thousands of plastic detergent sachets.
Why not push the burden back onto the companies providing the goods in packages? If Walmart (or it's suppliers) had to prepay for the handling of the waste the products they sell come in you'd probably see a significant reduction in packaging.
In The Netherlands we had a Packaging Tax for supermarkets for a while (it has been repealed after a short time, because of resistance and lobbying).
I liked the idea, except there was a problem (IMHO) in how it was implemented, because there was no requirement to show the tax amount that was charged to the consumer on their receipt.
If your receipt would say e.g. 'Groceries $30.00, Plastic tax: $2.05' then a consumer would have a real incentive to lower the amount of tax by choosing better packaging with less plastic.
I have always thought that recycling is a scam. That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals. But everyone is caught up in the feel goodness and if you don't you're some kind of animal.
I say put everything in the landfill, we will one day harvest it and all that resource will be in one place!
Just wondering why burning it to produce energy isn’t considered in US. Many countries like Sweden have managed to completely get rid of garbage this way [0].
These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce my impact on the planet: eating a plant-based diet, never traveling by plane and only rarely by car (I never learned to drive and the vast majority of my travel during the year is by bicycle, public transit or foot), never having kids, and living in a small apartment.
Does separating my glass and plastic jars really make that much of an additional difference?
There really hasn't been any point to recycling paper, plastic, and glass for quite some time now. Recycling glass hasn't made sense ever since local bottling plants ceased to exist in most cities, removing the system by which they were able to re-use recycled bottles. Recycling paper is obviously no longer a sensible activity given the issues of contamination and lack of economic incentives given just how cheap sustainably harvested wood has become. Plastic, well plastic would make sense if we could ever figure out how to sort all the different types automatically. The re-use of recycled plastic is basically limited to a handful of common product types (plastic bottles that are either HDPE or PET and easily identifiable as such).
That said, one should always make an effort to recycle aluminum properly. There's a reason aluminum is often referred to as "solidified electricity" and it's because it takes enormous amounts of energy to extract aluminum from raw ore. Recycling finished aluminum goods cuts out that entire step of the production chain and has an enormous impact on large-scale energy consumption.
So if recycling makes no sense why do I and everyone else here in Switzerland do it?
We separate paper, cardboard, glass (by color) [1], aluminium and plastics (PET). All of those are free to get rid of. Trash however is not and is charged at a high rate per bag.
Paper and cardboard go to several paper plants which re-use it to produce recycled paper items.[2]
PET is turned back into bottle and other items [3]
Aluminum is reused and saves more than 95% of the original energy required to produce it (as you said) [4]
2/3 of the glass collected is turned into new bottles. [5]
Trash is sent of to an incineration plant which produces electricity and heat [6].
Aside from aluminium, there doesn't seem to be much of a point of recycling even though city governments keep doing it. (Even for stuff like aluminium cans, the rate of recycling has decreased, because the can design has improved and each can uses very little aluminium.)
But innovations in the field of recycling would over time alleviate these issues. Stopping the recycling efforts altogether would also halt these innovations.
And by charging a (relatively) large amount of money for getting rid of trash - like they do in Switzerland - is a great tool of both raising awareness with consumers, improving habits, and making recycling economically viable in the meantime.
> So if recycling makes no sense why do I and everyone else here in Switzerland do it?
Here near Seattle, it's mandated by law. Do laws require recycling in Switzerland? Each of the recycling facts may be true in small runs of sorted material. It is more difficult to make these true in large runs of unsorted material.
Tangent: Where are the AI that should sort these for us?
Not everything is required to be sorted by law but regular trash is abhorrently expensive and if you try to dispose of it without paying they have people who's job it is to go through those bags and find out who dumped it. So you try to minimize the amount of trash you generate by recycling everything you can. Additionally stores are required to keep packaging if you request it and you can dispose of old electronics at any place that sells electronics. Compacting your trash without paying extra will also result in a fine and so does placing your trash outside not on trash day (at least in some places). Thankfully we have theses (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhbhvdvTWUg) in a lot of places so you can dump your trash anytime.
> You can dispose of old electronics at any place that sells electronics.
That is true of the European Union in general. However, I suspect that a lot of the old electronics thrown away find themselves to one of those African recycling dystopias where poor people just melt down circuit boards, inhaling toxic fumes all day long. I find it difficult to believe that some decade-old mobile phone or clock that I drop off at a shop’s collection point, actually goes to a high-tech, safe recycling center.
My town in Japan has 7 different categories of garbage (it's different for each city). They wouldn't take my plastic garbage for ages because I didn't know what "puramaaku ari" and "puramaaku nashi" meant. Eventually I figured out that it was "pla-mark", or the plastic recycling mark. So you have to put plastic with the recycling mark in "puramaaku ari" bags and plastic without the recycling mark in the "puramaaku nashi". You're required to write your name on the bags, so they deliver your badly sorted trash bags to your door :-) I think it took me about 3 months to figure it out. I had a mountain of plastic trash in my shed that I slowly disposed of over the next year. At least here it's a very effective method to get people to do their sorting. People even clean their garbage!
Seattle traded one 4-bin system (glass, plastic, aluminum, garbage) for a 3-bin system (recycle, compost, garbage). And the documentation is available in numerous languages, including Japanese. :) This system sounds like a mix of both, with 1 bin more thrown in for fun.
Does having such strict controls on disposal make you think twice before buying something - have you ever thought "I like that, but how would I dispose of the packaging?"
Personally, it absolutely has. Especially some of the garbage doesn't get collected very often (for example glass is once a month) and we don't have room in the apartment to store trash. So for example, I'll buy beer in cans because aluminium compacts well in the bags and so I can store it easily. I used to prefer glass bottles because the size is convenient (600 ml rather than 500 ml, which is perfect for sharing with my wife), but in our current apartment (which has less space) we haven't bought glass bottles for years. Also, just yesterday, I had a choice between not very nice fresh tomatoes (the season really gets going in October here) and canned tomatoes. The canned tomatoes would have been much better quality for what I was doing (cooking), but I really didn't want to deal with the can (which is hard to crush and takes up a lot of room).
On the downside, non-recyclable plastic is kind of at an advantage because it compacts really well. Also, burnable trash (which is basically paper and organic waste) is easy to dispose of because it is collected twice a week (hot countries need to do this). So a lot of my neighbours have mountains of cardboard and plastic bags (we're pretty careful anyway, so generally it's not too bad). It would be great if there was a compostable category that was collected often that didn't take cardboard. That way the cardboard could come once a month and I'm sure it would cut down on paper packaging.
Of course, this works well because we have no room for trash. In other parts of the world where people have garages as big as my entire apartment, I think it would have considerably less effect.
In Sweden there's a "standard glass bottle" for 33cl soft drinks, and they get washed and reused when you return them for your deposit. Typically a single bottle gets reused around 20 times.
They've almost completely disappeared from the market in favor of aluminum cans and 50cl PET bottles due to consumer preference (lighter weight, less fragile)
Recycling is a way to profit off of virtue signaling. Why should I separate my trash to make some recycling company more profitable? If they pay me enough, I might do it. Otherwise, it's all going into the landfill.
Even aluminum.
If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough -- they can go dig it up.
I dislike companies making profits on forced labor. Too many virtue-signaling municipalities mandate recycling (and sometimes even charges you for pickup) just so some recycling company can increase its bottom line. Nonsense. Bury everything. It's cheap.
> If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough -- they can go dig it up.
The point of recycling aluminium is that is avoids the enormous energy expenditures and carbon of processing raw ore. So, recycling is a sensible step towards environmental protection. It might “make a company some money”, but your failing to do it still has environmental consequences. And if a company had to go “dig it up”, there would probably still be more carbon generated than if you just sorted your rubbish.
I'm reading the parent post's argument as less against recycling as such but rather against trash sorting by the general population.
I.e. if recycling aluminium saves more resources than it cost in labor/effort, then it should be economically profitable to do so with the recycling company doing the sorting of that aluminium out of trash or even digging it up from the landfill instead of processing raw ore.
If recycling something is profitable only if subsidized by free sorting labor from the general population, then it seems like a signal that it's not actually worth it to spend that labor on it, if reusing that material is so worthless compared to the effort it takes to sort it; so (depending on local economics) it may be that it's good to recycle scrap metal and aluminium and worthless to recycle paper or some types of plastic.
The effort it takes to sort it out from the rest of your trash once it's mixed in with your diapers and whatever else probably isn't equivalent to the effort of you sorting it in the first place, though
The idea that separating trash into 2 or 3 streams comes at a big personal cost is kind of ridiculous though. It doesn't involve a lot of time or space or whatever.
What's it worth to you?
I'll gladly separate out my aluminum if you send me a check each month. How much are you willing to pay?
You see, this isn't about virtue, or saving the planet, or any warm-fuzzy feelings.
It's amount metal.
It's my aluminum.
I bought it. I have already paid my portion of the "enormous energy expenditures". If you want MY aluminum sent to some reprocessing facility, cut me a check each month and I'll sell you MY aluminum.
All this talk of carbon and the environment... did you not read the article?! This is a multi-billion dollar business! This stuff is getting shipped all over the world. Until you -- or someone -- offers me hard cold cash for my aluminum, I'll do with it what I want.
> I have already paid my portion of the 'enormous energy expenditures'.
Unless your country has a truly effective carbon-offset plan, then the price you paid for that aluminium likely does not take into account the environmental externalities of producing it. Furthermore, the pure energy costs of producing aluminium – environmental externalities aside – are actually state-subsidized in a few places, so what one pays may not entirely cover the production.
> This is a multi-billion dollar business! This stuff is getting shipped all over the world.
As I said, the market and legislation being what it is, it is entirely possible for companies to make money from recycling, while at the same time an individual’s decision not to aid that recycling has an environmental toll. It may indeed be desirable to enact laws that redirect some of those recycling profits back to consumers, but in the meantime, simply refusing outright to sort your rubbish is still a jerk thing to do.
> ...simply refusing outright to sort your rubbish is still a jerk thing to do.
Don't really have any other option where I live since there's just a couple of shared dumpsters for the apartment complex and the neighbors across the street would probably get upset if us apartment dwellers filled up their recycling bin on a regular basis.
Though, now that I'm thinking about it, my collection of years worth of fast food bags I have sitting in a cupboard might just end up in one of those bins next garbage day...
I feel like sites like hackernews get a higher than average amount of complete sociopaths who think of their relationship with the world only in how much it inconveniences or benefits them. Developers are smart, but that doesn't make up for a lack of care about anything outside their narrow view of self-interest.
I just leave the aluminum cans in a bag next to the dumpster and they get magically recycled with no effort on my part by the folks who dumpster dive for recyclables around here. Saves them the hassle of digging them out and I get the satisfaction of knowing I'm doing my part for Mother Nature -- win/win in my book.
Your steps go far beyond what most people do. However, the real significance is at the macro level. It's not about what individuals do, it's about the systematic effects.
Our system today wouldn't function at all if everyone acted like you (I'm not saying it would be bad! We probably should have a totally different system that would work for far more people living your way).
The real issue with consumption and waste-disposal lies with the patterns in the economy that encourage the creation of disposable products in the first place.
All that said, recycling can still be positive if done right. ANd separating glass and plastic etc. would be trivial if the producers of goods were set up more to make it as easy as possible.
I think never traveling beyond a 30-mile radius is more detrimental to society as a whole than an occasional flight. After all, a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 which can at least mitigate that impact.
> After all, a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10 which can at least mitigate that impact.
That uses an offset price of $7/ton, which seems rather low. Otherwise, offsetting the world's emissions would be only about $200b a year (.2% of world economy)
The actual emissions aren't too controversial (calculator I used ends up ~50% higher), but the offsetting price is very controversial. (source I linked to seems to use $30/ton, 3x United's)
The problem with a voluntary offsetting regime to calculate damage prices is that the clearing price is the marginal cost of abatement for a voluntarily requested amount of CO2 to be abated. As more CO2 is requested to be abated, the marginal costs go up (less low hanging fruit like planting trees).
Regardless, while you might feel good that you paid $10/ton to abate your flight, the reality is that if everyone else did this, you'd be paying a lot more than $10/ton.
> I think never traveling beyond a 30-mile radius is more detrimental to society as a whole than an occasional flight
You know when you travel by plane, you fly over most of the terrain you might have encountered if you took a bicycle? What's more detrimental now? Twain wrote,
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
But read his books, and you'll see how he traveled: slowly.
> a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10
You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that.
I was referring to cultures experienced and perspective gained more than terrain covered. Most people today cannot afford to travel as slowly as he had the great fortune of doing.
I agree that a carbon offset doesn't absolve you of responsibility, but like everything in life, it's tradeoffs.
> You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that.
What's so complicated about "tax people that produce CO2, pay people that capture CO2"?
My guess is recycling doesn't make much of an additional difference. There's a reason it's third in reduce-reuse-recycle. I separate out recyclables mostly out of habit (and garbage service bin for recycling is much larger than than one for garbage) but I wonder whether recycling could be a net negative due to moral exhaustion/fatigue/substitution -- surely there is research on this, and I would love pointers to it.
If you’re not going to have kids, there will simply be fewer people next generation who will share your concerns about the environment.
If you absolutely want to minimize your environmental impact to the extent that you think reproducing is pointless, isn’t the logical end result to immediately commit suicide as well?
Might be China is just tired of buying waste. Yes, waste, not "recyclables". Even if plastic and paper were clean and perfectly sorted by type, you still couldn't really recycle them like you can recycle metals and glass. It's always downcycling.
Another reason is that China wants its domestic recycling (meaning curbside collection) industry to develop. While the processing industry can get cheaper input through importing, it lessens the interest in collecting domestic sources, generating more pollution or waste for the landfills.
There's still some manual picking involved in most plants. Robots are taking that over at a few plants.[2]
Aluminum is the moneymaker. Plastic bottles can go to a plant that turns them back into pellets for making new bottles.[3] A huge plant now serves southern California. Not clear this makes money.
Waste paper isn't that valuable. "Peak paper" was a while back, and US paper mills have been closing for years. It's not that sorting is hard, it's that the product is so low-value.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk