If your strategy is in place, use all the tactics that contribute to it. But if you don't have your strategy in place, tactics can do nothing or even move you backward.
Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
We are stepping on the gas, thinking we're stepping on the brake.
> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
I don't think this is strictly true. It certainly is not the explanation for why we have most of the recycling programs we do have.
Overpaying for unnecessary recycling reduces growth. Economically efficient recycling increases it.
Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.
There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway.
The issue of expecting and engineering unending growth is an interesting topic but doesn't really have anything to do with this article.
>Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.
Are you saying that's what corporations should morally do, or that that's what they should logically do to increase profits? It could be that a corporation saying "buy our stuff then recycle it" causes more people to buy the stuff than saying "buy our stuff then throw it away". In that situation, a profit motivated corporation would promote recycling even if it hurts the environment.
I'm speaking of broad interest categories. Obviously aluminum mining companies aren't going be in favor of aluminum recycling, but in general, lower aluminum prices increase economic growth potential and should be supported by other companies in general purely out of self-interest.
> There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway
Are there many known examples of this? Kinda curious about what shape this problem takes in context
> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
What do you mean by "promotes growth" here? You pay for your recycling just like your trash. Why would any company like it more than reducing overall waste?
It promotes their growth -- say packaged good companies like Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, or Starbucks. Clothing companies like H&M and Zara. Most unnecessary material stuff.
> 99% of things Americans buy end up in landfills within one year.
What "things" means here? A car is a "thing" and a toothpick is a "thing". I can use the car for 10 years and I use several toothpicks per day. So on average, I throw nearly everything very quickly, but the picture seems to be misleading if we remember we're comparing toothpicks to cars...
Another way to put it is whether this is 99% of “individual items” or 99% by mass or volume, etc., and which such way of measuring gives the fairest picture of the lifecycle of products going to landfills.
Averaging over categories of wildly distinct things is misleading. It's like taking average temperature of all human bodies in the hospital and judging public health by that measure - ignoring the fact that some of those are dead bodies in the freezer and some are running high fever. Or, another example, if you look at average wealth of people in a pub, and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet walk in to have a pint, the average wealth would jump up, but nobody really became any richer. Conclusions made on this kind of measures make sense only in specific conditions, but when we could a huge expensive car as one thing and 1000 tiny toothpicks as 1000 things and averaging over that, it can not help but being misleading.
Governments should tax products for their disposal costs. Eventually everything needs to be disposed of so charge it at purchase time and remove the costs the individual pays later for garbage collection. This would mean products that don't use wasteful packaging become cheaper and people would buy less junk.
Every board room: "Just put some soil and seeds into this used plastic bottle and it becomes a handy plant pot - therefore it has an extended use and shouldn't need disposing of, hence zero disposal tax!"
Not OP but if you look at packaging you can find examples where it’s in an industry’s interest to create disposable packaging over recycled packaging. Be it plastics, glass, aluminum, tin or cardboard. But also your “cell” batteries and clothing, etc.
> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
Put a bit more directly, corporations like recycling because it shifts the burdens of waste onto consumers and society at large, while allowing them to continue pursuing growth and privately concentrating profits.
How about this information from CT's DEEP which quotes the EPA for the majority of it's information? Compared to virgin materials, using recycled materials more efficient by:
- 40% for paper
- 60-74% for steel and tin cans
- 33% for plastics
- 30% for glass
- 5% for aluminum cans
These numbers appear to be referencing the generation of new products using recycled vs new materials, but do they fail to take in to account the cost of actually getting those recycled materials (ie going from trash to the recycled paper pulp)?
I always thought the 3 R's are in the order they are for a reason.
Reduce - first step realize that happiness is not automatically linked to consumption. This is harder than it seems because this extends beyond product consumption to other forms of material consumption like traveling by plane or car (IC vs EV vs hybrid is a whole other debate)
Reuse - once you have something, get the full use out of it, and try to repurpose it for other uses too if possible.
Recycle - once you have used something to the point that can no longer serve it's purpose adequately because it's worn out, place it or parts of it in a recycling bin if possible.
What this article and discussion has prompted me to do is research further into which parts of something deserve to be placed in the recycle bin (whether or not there is an established way to recycle them, ie plastics) and if certain reduction techniques aren't all they're cracked up to be (reusable straws and shopping bags)
It's not clear to me from that link whether those savings apply to the whole supply chain or not.
So when they say stuff like... "Producing recycled paper requires about 60 percent of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp."
... does that include costs of reasonably sustainable forestry vs. reasonably sustainable old paper separation & collection?
... does it include non-financial costs made by the end-users of the original paper?
... does it include implicit costs of potentially lower quality paper (or if that's ever the case, the values of higher-quality)?
... does it include the opportunity costs (probably small) of whatever else you might do with that old paper, such as sequester carbon or burn for energy?
... does it consider costs of energy (some joules are cheaper and less damaging than others; so e.g. it may be wood->paper factors run where energy is trivially cheap and simply haven't bothered to try and be energy-efficient)?
... does it consider non-energy resources?
Basically, it's not clear to me whether this is a technical argument about one of the important steps in the respective processes, or an overall assessment about the approaches going forward.
Aluminium is the prime example of a material that's really worth recycling. Production of aluminium involves both high temperatures (950 to 980 degrees Celsius) and a rather large amount of electricity. Recycling just involves melting the aluminium down (The melting temperature is around 660 degrees Celsius).
>Production of aluminium involves both high temperatures (950 to 980 degrees Celsius) and a rather large amount of electricity.
It’s rare I see anyone have even the slightest bit of actual production knowledge in these climate-related topics, so I appreciate that.
You’re right about recycling aluminum. It’s also why a LOT of the new production work is done in Iceland with geothermal heat and nearly free electricity.
Unfortunately, it makes so much sense to produce aluminum in Iceland, that it’s shipped from China to Iceland and back again to do so... on crude tanker fuel at very low efficiency.
There's the in-home cost. My mother-in-law would run the cans and bottles through the dishwasher before putting them in the rcycle bin. The energy, hot water, soap constituted a catastrophic reversal of any possible gain from the recycling.
Just driving the truck around the neighborhood to pick up the bins is a cost in diesel, human resources (which translate to carbon at some level).
I live in a city where trash collection rates are tied to how big of a trashcan you have. Along with recycling and compost collection programs, this is intended to deter people from overusing the landfill.
BUT, as a result of having a very small trashcan (to minimize my personal cost) I end up putting the can out every week if the can is even 1/4 full, as I occasionally have a heavy week due to an event or seasonal cleaning and I don't want to have garbage around the place for extra week(s). The desired effect on my waste habits, i.e. reducing the amount of landfill trash I ultimately produce, is negligible.
Therefore the garbage truck must stop at my house roughly twice as often as it would if there was no disincentive cost to having a large can. If enough other people in my city operate like I do, then we're running a significant amount of extra trucks and labor for virtually no benefit.
> The same truck would still drive arround though if you didn't have recycling program, it will just be a black truck instead of a green one.
It might not depending on the system in place. Many recycling programs require two truck routes to separately collect the trash and recycling. This doubles the amount of trucks and human labor but the trash load produced by each property stays the same.
In NYC there are separate routes and trucks to collect recycling. Saw the same thing in San Diego. One truck does the trash route, and some time later comes the recycling truck.
In most of the UK now, recycling is collected more frequently than non-recycling. For us, non-recycling is only collected every 2 weeks, and the bin issued for it is half the size of the recycling bin.
Food waste is still collected weekly, and is sent to an anaerobic digestion plant.
Not the previous poster, but it seems "black" represents garbage truck whilst "green" represents recycling.
The argument they were making is if your garbage weren't going to a recycling plant, it would be going to a landfill. Either way, the same amount of waste has to be transported from your home, so the same number of trucks would still be driving around.
Recycling is a trivial number of trucks. And far as I know, they don't crush the material. Also they keep it separate (paper/glass/metal) and the sections probably never fill evenly. So a pretty inefficient operation is my guess.
That may be with the recycling operation were you live, but everywhere I have lived it's been one bin type, one truck, dump the bin and go. The only time I have had to do more than separate paper from non-paper was back when I also had to hand-carry recyclables to a drop spot.
But then your garbage truck (black) would have to pick up all the recycling that the green truck used to pick up.
So unless your current black trucks are never full then you would either need more black trucks or they would need to make 2x the trips.
In our household we wash our glass and metal packaging for recycling in the old-fashioned way, with water and suds in the sink alongside the rest of the post-dinner washing up. It's a lot quicker than a dishwasher, uses a lot less water and detergent, and quite relaxing and therapeutic in its own weird way. (Takes time out to shine halo)
Well, if you're using less than 5% of energy, that means with the same amount of energy you can make 20x. So I'd say it's actually 1900% more efficient.
Yes, you are right! Each bullet point on their site tried to word it slightly differently so it was a little confusing. I messed up translating the aluminum one clearly. Thanks for pointing it out!
> first step realize that happiness is not automatically linked to consumption
I’ve always thought that framing the issue like this is both smug and dishonest.
Smug because you’re essentially saying that people are wrong about the things they believe bring them satisfaction and comfort.
Dishonest because reduce in this context will always mean a reduction in quality of life.
Aside from being an ineffective way to convince people of anything, it also seems counterproductive in the sense that it alienates people from caring about the issue.
I don't know about smug, is more just a factual appraisal. People are very often wrong about the things they believe bring them satisfaction and comfort. That is clearly evident. This is also to be expected though, as we are all just making it up as we go along really.
As for reduction in the quality of life, you don't generally tell an obese person that their quality of life would improve if they could just eat more cake. Consumption and quality of life are not in a linear relationship.
This is a profoundly consumerist point of view, IMO. It presupposes that buying more stuff necessarily brings more satisfaction and comfort (which is not true in general once one's basic needs for security, food, shelter, and healthcare are met), and that having less stuff means "a reduction in quality of life" (also not true, having less stuff leads to an increase in quality of life for many people).
There are demonstrably a lot of unsatisfied, uncomfortable people who have a lot of stuff and whose quality of life is quite poor, all things considered.
This position erroneously presupposes that life satisfaction and quality of life are the same thing. Many people are satisfied with a lower quality of life, and are more than happy to invest tremendous effort into things that others may expect to be more convenient. But the point of view in the parent comment is essentially “if you do not derive satisfaction in life from the same things that I do, then you are wrong”, which is remarkably arrogant and closed minded.
Quality of life is a subjective issue [1], of which material possesion is just one amongst several dimensions. Therefore, it is perfectly possible for a person to improve their quality of life by consuming less: by the very definition of quality of life, it is enough for said person to feel that their quality of life improved as a result of consuming less for it to be true.
Nearly all of the metrics used to track quality of life relate directly to consumption. Perhaps I would have been better to say ‘standard of living’, which exclusively measures consumption. But none of that changes my point, which is when you say ‘reduce’ in this context, you’re not being honest about what you’re reducing, and basically saying that the only correct way to derive satisfaction from life is the way that you do it (or at least the way you’re proposing it should be done).
I agree, I think a lot of the "reduce consumption or you are wasting your time/money/harming the environment" propaganda takes it too far.
I stated it the way I did to point out that happiness is not linked to consumption in the sense that more consumption does not always equate to more happiness. On the flip side, I was also not referring to a reduction of consumption to the point that it influences one's quality of life. Personally, over the last few months I've noticed some purchases I made in the past that I didn't need or didn't use enough to make it worth it, or where I could have used something I already had on-hand. I use that as a learning opportunity, to adjust my mindset into the future by creating a couple of simple guidelines before making semi-major purchases (did I sleep on it, did I do adequate research into pros/cons/alternatives without going crazy, etc).
Quite to the contrary of what you are saying, I find a reduction of purchases in this way will positively contribute to my quality of life, both in the present and in the future with increased savings rate and decreased clutter. I'd much rather live in a place where I wasn't looking at stuff I don't use and feeling bad about it. I think you falsely equated my statement and this idea about reduction with the millennial's definition of minimalism. That carries a smug connotation, I'm just talking about mindfulness that fits seamlessly into place with your current lifestyle. I even tried not to take a stance on the issue, and only stated that consumption is both the products you buy and the ways you go about doing things, not that anyone who consumes above X amount is evil.
People saying this are frequently those who would also admit that they were wrong about the things they believed to bring them satisfaction and comfort. From their own experience they know that it did not mean a reduction in quality of life for them. That doesn't mean it works that way for everyone, but it's not dishonest.
If you believe that the future of the world depends on reducing consumption, a presupposition which is not necessarily true, then you are asking people to reduce their quality of life. That’s not to say that people cannot be satisfied by a reduced quality of life, but asking people to sacrifice things that bring them comfort, convenience or satisfaction is by definition asking them to reduce their quality of life.
I'm not referring to asking people to sacrifice something, but to question assumptions around consumption which supposedly brings comfort, convenience or satisfaction. That doesn't mean all those assumptions are wrong, but that it's likely some of them are.
That's weird. In my experience, products advertising "made using recycled materials" tend to be more expensive than without (with the exception of aluminum, which tends not to be advertised as recycled at all). Are there costs missing from your efficiency numbers?
>In my experience, products advertising "made using recycled materials" tend to be more expensive than without
That's not necessarily because of their higher cost to produce. It's often because they target higher end "environmentally conscious" customers, and use the "made with recycled materials" as a price differentiation / market segmentation strategy (working class Joe? get our $1 notebook. Latte-sipping hipster? Here's our $5 recycled notebook)...
In an economic system, a product will be sold at the highest price possible, so if advertising it as using recycled materials nets you higher profit, than you will do that. So even if non-recycled is more expensive to produce, it will be cheaper if people are not willing to pay as much for it.
This only looks at energy consumed during production, not at (long term) availability of raw materials. It seems reasonable to assume that long term the cost of energy and recyclables will go down and that of non-renewables such as oils and ores will go up.
We really shot ourselves in the foot with this whole pointless "recycling paper and plastic" thing huh?
The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization and one of life's little pleasures, and we had to ruin it by acting like it's wrong when it's actually not.
When I walk up to some wastebins holding a papery-plasticky object with a bit of food stuck to it, my heart sinks. Now I have to think about classifying it into one of 2-4 inconsistent-looking bins, and I feel guilty that the classification isn't perfect - which would be okay if it was for a good cause, but the whole concept of recycling paper and plastic was a net-negative to begin with.
Recycling is one of those things that feels like it solves a problem but doesn't at all - like hybrid cars, US-style airport security, or donating cans of food.
> The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization ...
I think you got it backwards. Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived, just like defecating wherever you find convenient, hunting animals for dinner, or riding hoses on whatever side of road you like.
The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need. Just like modern cars necessitated speed limits, stop signs, and annoying lane-changing rules, mass production requires one to think about how to dispose stuff without ruining ourselves.
So, yeah I think you got it backwards. Maybe recycling doesn't work as well as advertised, but that doesn't mean we are off the hook. It just means we need a different solution.
> Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived
What? Absolutely not. Things were precious and labor was cheap back in the day.
Anything that could be repaired was. Ever heard of "darning socks"? Yeah - no one would do that today, but it was common 100 years ago.
> just like defecating wherever you find convenient
Lol.
People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap about where you give a crap or people get sick and die. This is 2000 BC social technology.
> The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away" stuff we don't need.
BS.
The earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big. Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough for anything we will make in the next 100 years with space left over.
We don't do this because it's cheaper to have small landfills closer to cities, but that's an economic limitation, not a technical one.
The wonder (and horror) of modern civilization is that this kind of thinking is obsolete. Pregnant women are advised not to eat tuna, caught anywhere, because we managed to pollute the entire ocean with mercury. We're producing so much chemical fertilizers that we create more biologically available nitrogen than the rest of nature combined. And of course we're warming the planet itself.
Even ancient Americans, with their stone tools, managed to exterminate virtually every large animal in the Americas.
> Conceptually it's trivial to make a landfill large enough ...
Conceptually it's also trivial to stop global warming. We just have to stop making any more CO2 (and maybe suck up a bit from the air). Doesn't mean it's easy in practice.
>People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap about where you give a crap or people get sick and die. This is 2000 BC social technology.
The tragedy of it is that we are technologically better placed than ever to make and mend items which will last a lifetime, and beyond, but consumerism and never-ending economic growth mean that instead we have planned obsolescence, and almost everything made as cheaply as possible, with consequent reduction in quality and less satisfaction overall.
Most garbage is not obsolete or broken equipment. Most garbage is packaging (cardboard shipping boxes, plastic yoghurt cups etc), which nobody wants or needs to last for a lifetime.
"The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer feasible to just "throw away""
By the same token, it gave us the power to produce so much stuff that we can afford to throw stuff away.
Who darns socks anymore? Or has their tv repaired?
Your average family of 100 years ago was throwing away ashes and what? The rag and bone man collected rags and bones, veg peelings would have gone to a chicken/pig/compost. Paper probably went in the fire. Plastic was none existent, metal? (rag and bone man? I'm guessing there was a market for it somewhere).
It isn't the 'normal' thing though, certainly not for younger generations.
What were the economics of your tv repair, what was the cost of the repair v replacement and how old was the tv? Last time I looked into it, they were doubtful they could get the parts, and the likely charge was higher than replacing the tv. The same isnt true for emptying the ashtray. In fact I don't even need to take the car to the garage to empty the ashtray, I can do it myself!
most of what we throw away is packaging. in the past there was little packaging. and most packaging was reusable, a cloth, a bag or a chest for example.
if it wasn't for packaging, in my daily life i would hardly have any trash at all. almost everything i am able to reuse, and i buy with re-usability in mind.
this is not something i learned in school, or from somehow environmentally conscious parents. i am actually not sure where this came from. we did it out of habit. waste not, want not. maybe it came from not being able to afford to keep buying new stuff. it wasn't really conscious.
reusing vs throwing away is more likely split along rich vs poor. and on the past more people were not rich. they were not necessarily poor in the sense of struggling to survive but the average population created everything they needed for themselves or bartered it. there was no space for trash.
buying new things is a sign of wealth. this is especially visible in china where second hand markets are practically non-existent. people pride themselves that they can afford to buy new stuff.
note that reusing is different from recycling. reusing happens at home or on the second hand market. recycling comes from collecting trash and transforming it.
so in that sense recycling is very new. but reusing is old.
Hmm I'm pretty sure these forks and vampire hunting crossbows from then were coming in their plastic wrappers. Else, not sure how they'd handle container shipping without breaking the merchandise.
Even in old times it may be less true than you'd think. I was recently reading one of the Little House books to my kid and there's few sentences in there in their move to the west, how Ma cleaned up their lunch scraps and packing them along when on the pioneer trail in the middle of otherwise nowhere in their journey across the Dakotas.
those people were moving to the west in search for a place to live. they moved because they couldn't live where they were. if they could afford to throw stuff away they probably would not have moved in the first place
To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead. North America was labour scarce compared to Europe from 1492 on. There was always a place to live and work to do for the able bodied who were willing to work. That’s why millions traveled from Europe to save large sums of money before going home to buy a farm or send for their families from home.
People did not go West because they had no place to live.
"To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead."
This may be true, generally, but it was not true of the Ingalls family that your grandparent refers to. Their travel and settlement plans were not the most well thought out ...
i mean live on their own land and have their own farm instead of being a laborer depending on a salary. and since it was expensive many put all they had into that and could not afford to waste any of it.
I meant the convenience of tossing something away and having it go somewhere properly out of the way.
You mention "defecating wherever you find convenient" - yes, another pleasure of modern life is that at any time I can walk to a nearby bathroom and defecate, and do so on top of much more sanitary infrastructure than we ever had in the past.
Wish-cycling. You want it to be true. You have good intentions. You want your waste to be recycled. So you throw it into a recycling bin. Maybe it'll work? It seems better to err on the side that it will? But unfortunately when it gets to the sorting table/machines it often just makes things worse.
2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and
3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.
Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up burning the oil.
But if you fail any of these three points, you're better off banning single-use plastics.
> You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.
Oddly, this seems to be the most difficult part of the equation here in NYC. Containerization needs to be adopted in order to make the system more efficient and sanitary. Containerization would prevent refuse from spilling into the street, into the storm drains, etc. The current system (curbside pickup of plastic bags) falls over (literally and figuratively) in too many ways and the sanitation workers aren't interested in picking up the slack -- they ignore anything not secured in a plastic bag.
I believe Japan follows this system. It was very confusing when I visited because they sort their waste into combustible and non-combustible, instead of trash vs. recycle.
I know that many places have modern incinerators, but that's only 1 of 3. If it was in the US, I'd expect that actually sorting trash effectively would be a big problem, despite having a modern incinerator.
"Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3."
Zurich has a very centrally located incinerator (behind the "viadukt" shopping area) and I believe that they generate electricity from the plant. They also have a very granular sorting regime ... it would appear they are covering all three of the bases.
Sweden incinerates 97% of all its non-recyclable trash, obviously has modern incinerators, and has some oil-powered power plants for peak load purposes.
If there's food/greade on the item that can't be removed for one reason or another toss it, it can't be recycled efficiently. There solved your moral dilemma. Generally only clean paper, glass, and metal are recyclable. Plastics depend entirely on the locality and still require it to be clean.
Also I work at a food pantry. Donations of canned goods are always welcome, same for razors, toiletries, etc. Anything that can be eaten without a stove is generally welcome.
Recycling has built up such inertia as the "moral" path, regardless of its inefficiencies for most materials, that it's become an unsustainable clusterfuck that we can't move away.
Where I live, it's been codified- municipalities must recycle, and also must discourage landfill-bound waste. The result is that I've been issued a 64-gallon mixed-recycling bin that is picked up once a week, and a small 36-gallon trash can that's picked up every two weeks. There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful- not as some kind of environmental whatever, but it's just in our moral framework. A 36-gallon trash can holds about 2.5 full kitchen garbage bags in it, so if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup (reducing our available volume for that period then). Anything out there then sits in the sun for 2 weeks stinking and attracting raccoons/rodents until the next pickup.
The result? Anything remotely resembling "recyclable" gets tossed in the recycling bin. Food/grease on it? Put it in the bin. You know where the stuff in that bin goes now? It goes to the recycling facilities and then sits there in huge piles because no one will buy it anymore because the whole system was propped up on bullshit the entire time.
To top all that off, the law also prevents these now-inundated recycling facilities from moving their material to a landfill for proper disposal. So it literally just sits there and we have absolutely no solution for it. It would be political suicide to advocate the loosening of recycling laws, no matter how broken they are, so you'll never have a representatives willing to fix this problem.
You're not going to solve the problem and your municipality isn't helping unless it burning the garbage, because that's what contaminated loads are. There's absolutely no reason to have multi stream plastics recycling at the consumer end, save for plastic bags because at scale they can be recycled. Only a very small amount of plastics are monetarily valuable. I would not feel guilty at all about throwing out plastics unless they are clean and food free. It's pointlessly wasteful as most processing plants in the US cannot handle soiled recyclables efficiently if at all. I say this as a long time, Earth hugging, reusable bag toting, fuel efficient vehicle recycler. The US is not a major contributor to plastics pollution. There should be no moral dilemma here. Just by trying to do the right thing in this case you're doing. If you want to do more have a cheese pizza night once a week instead of one with meat toppings and you'll significantly reduce your carbon footprint with minimal change to your lifestyle. If doing the by the planet is your thing having one vegetarian meal that you enjoy a week is going to be significantly more impactful at keeping the planet cleaner and using less resources (the reduce part of the 3rs) than most of the plastics recycling you do. Contaminated glass, plastics, and paper can ruin an entire comingled load which generally happens anyways.
Some specifics on ocean plastics that covers a bit of general plastics.
That’s a good point: if municipalities want you to recycle, they need to provide the necessary infrastructure, and that means at least three source separated bins (ideally 5-7), and a clean container collection system. Otherwise it just turns people off the whole system. A financial incentive to save money when you don’t throw away as much into the landfill bin helps too.
Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?
With respect to composting- we're also issued a yard waste bin that's for a composting program (a good idea), so some kitchen scraps can go in there (I'm renting and good compost takes longer than I plan on staying here), but food waste/kitchen scraps aren't a large part of what we fill up our landfill bin with. It's mostly food packaging that's definitely too leaky/gross for the recycling bin and general household waste from stuff like emptying the vacuum cleaner or soiled paper towels.
Necessary infrastructure extends beyond just providing for recycling- households are going to produce waste that doesn't make economic or environmental sense to recycle, and all the encouragement and financial incentives in the world aren't going to stop that. Encouraging people to be less wasteful is important, but we need to stop demonizing landfills and use of the landfill bins because that sentiment has perverted the whole household recycling process.
It's gotten so bad here that a few months ago, they had city representatives on the radio threatening fines for people that put non-recyclable waste in their bins, as if that's the solution to mixed-recycling being uneconomical. They went as far as to say that it was malicious- that people were putting non-recyclable stuff, like used pizza boxes (their example), in the recycling bins to purposefully sabotage the whole system. The disconnect is huge and at some point the holier-than-thou attitude and the short-sighted laws passed with it are going to blow up in our collective faces.
Ideally you would incentivize people to create less trash by charging them by weight or volume for collection, but there are two possibilities for households wanting lower bills: reducing waste or littering. And it only takes a few people choosing littering to make a huge mess.
I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It also makes products with wasteful packaging more expensive right there in the store, encouraging people to buy less wasteful alternatives.
This also why I like the idea of bottle deposits and would hope they continue into many other containers. The customer pays them up front and gets paid back when it properly enters the waste stream.
> There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful
> if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup
It's pretty easy to have much less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2-week. You should read just a tiny bit of zero waste please, it may help you immensely.
You may believe that recycling isn't working, that's fine, but there's plenty of simple easy ways to reduce waste and have less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2 weeks.
The 4 R rules is simple: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
I fully share this cynicism about recycling things that are not aluminum or glass. It also seems that by making people feel better about generating nominally recyclable waste they are encouraged to consume more.
I am at least familiar with arguments against US-style airport security and donating cans of food, but whats wrong with hybrid cars? I don't know of any arguments that they are net neutral / harmful.
It’s pretty common to see arguments that the net lifecycle impact of a hybrid outweighs that of a traditional car, because it has more impact in manufacturing. It’s not true (there is more impact in manufacturing, but the breakeven point is fairly early) but it’s an attractive notion to people with a contrarian bent, especially those who like to think that environmentalists are stupid.
Incidentally, the same thing exists for pure electric cars, solar panels, and just about anything else of that nature.
Brand new traditional car vs. hybrid might be close, but what about hybrid vs. that 2002 honda civic in the used car lot that also gets 45mpg? I think that's the real comparison, because that civic in the lot already exist in your area and works just fine to take you from A to B.
People buy new cars for dumb reasons, usually for nicer seats/better ac/speakers, and they in turn do away with their less shiny but usually still perfectly fine car. The car industry is rampant consumer culture at its worst, sustained by lessees insisting on new car smell.
Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually. I feel like there needs to be a serious study into whether increased mining/production of solar panels is a net gain or loss. It does feel however than reckoning with climate change will require more on the consumption/behavior side than technology side unfortunately.
The energy flow is a bit similar to the cash flow of a SAAS company: As ROI takes a few years, the start of the rapidly growing industry looks like a net negative, but with the installed capacity constantly growing and efficiency getting better, even the industry as a whole is in the black now.
So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted.
Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electricity plants vs solar and they came away with the realization that the only way gas wins is really due to the financing around it, so something totally due to regs and how society is already used to it. I just am not sure solar is going to be the silver bullet and actual reduction of consumption might be the only way to stave off climate change.
Nearly all current photovoltaic cell production is polysilicon, which does not require any rare elements or any rare-earth elements. There are some PV technologies that use rare elements such as indium and selenium, but they do not use rare-earth elements either; and, in any case, they have been pretty much priced out of the market by falling polysilicon costs. There are many kinds of rechargeable batteries, but none of them, to my knowledge, use rare-earth elements. In particular, the lithium-ion batteries in current large-scale use do not even use any rare elements. (Nickel-cadmium batteries used cadmium, which is about as rare as silver, but not a rare-earth element.)
Finally, rare earth elements are not rare (a dozen of them are each individually more abundant than tin), and there is no danger of depleting them.
These are the factual errors in the first factual sentence of your comment. This level of reliability leads me to believe that you are commenting with no concern for whether your comment is true or false, even without doing a similar level of investigation of the rest of your comment.
I think he was suckered by a deliberate propaganda effort to paint PV as dirty. Shellenberger was spreading that BS, and others picked it up without being sufficiently skeptical.
Absolutely, reduction should aways be the first option. Just like electric cars are still just a band aid for unsustainable urban design. The optimum would be more human-centric cities that reduce most needs for powered mobility. I have the luck to be able to live like that and it's just great. School, daycare, shopping and our workplaces are all within a 2km radius. Thus our household doesn't need any car, but everyone has a nice bike to get around. We literally save hours each day that would otherwise be wasted on mobility.
The currently externalized costs of mining the rare materials will for sure be disastrous, but then again they would also be for other types of energy production. Relative to other types of energy production, I think one can more or less ignore this point (unless there is some polluting process involved that only affects a specific mode of energy production).
> Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually
Which elements are you thinking of? The vast majority of PV being made today is silicon. The only rare element used in PV is silver for front contact wires, and that can be substituted for with proper design (copper wires can be used if a diffusion barrier layer of nickel or molybdenum is used to prevent its reaction with silicon.)
In the past, I was bearish on hybrids. They seemed overcomplicated and ineffectual.
After having driven one for a while, I've done a complete 180. The fact is, they're a perfect interim solution which really brings 'the best of both worlds'. One thing I wasn't expecting was how the system trains me to drive differently and minimize wasteful fuel use-- something that simply doesn't exist in non-hybrids. I think they make even more sense for large freight trucks, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of those.
In the U.S., more than half the top-selling vehicles are pure-ICE trucks or SUVs, and I would bet the majority of people buying them don't have a sensible use case. There is plenty of room for hybrids to make a difference. When you can get the same or better performance for half the fuel (or less), it's a no-brainer, and the market will eventually catch up to that.
Your experience doesn't seem like it would refute that? To be fair I'm not sure how you could refute it without long term large scale reliability testing.
Hybrids are more complicated than non-hybrids, not so much mechanically as electrically and in the controls. It takes very sophisticated computer software and calibrations to properly manage the charge/discharge of the battery pack and the electric motors when doing regenerative braking or acceleration, in order to provide the same functionality as a simple throttle and mechanical brakes do in a non-hybrid.
No, the real progress has been stalled by low fuel prices. Most people would only buy EV (or Hybrids) if they could see a clear short term lower cost. The current high upfront cost of EVs completely outweighs the longer term savings (or other less tangible benefits) for most people. Hybrids were a good bridge solution with only a small incremental cost and significant savings but they are currently not in vogue with people who want something even more efficient, and the gas prices are so low as to be almost incidental to many buyers.
When my ordinary gasoline car gets nearly 40 mpg on the highway, and not much lower in city, I don't have much incentive to go electric. Thank you, variable valve timing engine.
What really reducd my gas consumption was moving to a place just a few miles from where I work.
Yeah, hybrid cars might be called a "local maximum"... at best.
"Local" because they were always predictably a technological dead end.
"Maximum" because they maybe gave us a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, although gas-efficient internal combustion engine cars may have been the more energy-efficient option all along when you consider the up-front cost and maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines.
The only thing we know for sure about hybrid cars is that Toyota successfully profited from selling people's self-image about being more energy efficient. But since we also have Tesla in the market, selling the actual solution to the problem of gas-burning transportation, absolutely no one should be buying hybrids.
Toyota was selling mass-produced plug-in "hybrids" and Nissan was selling 100mi range 100% electric Leafs before Tesla had even produced the Model S. Yes, Tesla made them sexy, but Toyota, Nissan, and even Ford & GM did the very early path-finding that I think we needed in order to move ahead with the technology and get to the point where people would feel comfortable considering them at all.
"maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines"
This is an oft repeated accusation by people who only know the concept of hybrids and have no actual experience with them.
The electrical system of hybrids are inherently low maintenance and the gasoline engines run under very low stress conditions for an engine. The result is that the gasoline engine needs much less maintenance. And the brakes are barely used.
The Prius is a better option from a lifecycle CO2 perspective in many places than either a high efficiency conventional vehicle or a pure battery-electric vehicle. That changes if your electricity comes from more renewable sources -- California, for example. Shorter commutes favor small battery packs or no batteries at all.
So is recycling plastic and paper not effective? I have some anxiety issue and one of the ways that they manifest is obsessing about recycling so not having to worry about plastic and paper would be a huge improvement in my quality of life.
Edit: I should clarify, I realize that the article is saying that recycling plastic and paper isn't worth it, but is that a mainstream opinion?
Newspapers are worth recycling, because they can be turned into new newspapers again, removing the ink and the metal can be done fairly efficiently.
Cardboard can be recycled fairly efficiently, and can be turned into new cardboard.
Plastic-covered/glued/glossy/window envelopes/food containers/other contaminated papers can't be recycled. Just incinerate it, or turn it into pellet fuel and incinerate it.
The alternative to recycling newspaper and cardboard is chopping down forests and turning them into pulp, a process that also needs a lot more logistics, chemicals, energy, and of course forests that you have to re-plant.
Recycling newspaper is a no-brainer from a cost perspective. You can't recycle forever though, each time you lose some wood fibers that are too short and have to be removed from the recycled pulp, so you have to add fresh pulp.
Pretty much all paper manufacturers are now require to plant more trees than they cut down.
Burying old newspapers in the ground is a form of carbon sequestration. Really it comes down to what takes less energy: cutting down the trees, or the transport, sorting and reprocessing of old newspapers.
I'd say that regardless of the effectiveness of recycling you shouldn't be doing it.
The (arguable) utility of your recycling vs. its cost to you is obviously very negative. And not just on purely selfish level: I don't know what your line of work is, but I'm sure society will benefit much more if you were calmer but didn't recycle than the other way around.
So here's a "get out of recycling jail" card for you and others like you. It's like herd immunization: Don't worry about it, we got you covered.
It's strangely mainstream in American libertarian circles (and therefore places like HN), but even they seem to spend most of their time railing against the sheep-like masses who have been hoodwinked so I guess even that is a tacit admission that it's not mainstream.
The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad.
On the other hand, here's a document comparing recycling to landfill (and incineration to generate power and a couple of other things). It summarises all the expert research from the actual field, rather than right wing economists.
Generally the experts suggest landfill is the worst option on several scales for basically all materials:
People who think recycling isn't good for the environment seem to fall into the same group as those who really worry about all the birds affected by wind turbines, or the impact of lithium mining or how carbon taxes will hurt the poor i.e. baseless propaganda aimed at people who care about the environment coming from people who clearly don't give a hoot.
+1: landfills is the worst option and should be never used for non-inert materials (that is why EU mandates incineration before bringing waste to the landfill). It is very hard and expensive to do it properly, with a perfect first layer, in a stable place, putting a lot of heterogeneous compounds doing a lot of different (and even unexpected) chemical reactions, using pipes to exchange air and drain/burn methane, maintenance and monitoring the site even for hundreds of year after closing it. It is a nightmare to handle that kind of landfills. Please incinerate everything first, and maybe reuse the ashes for public roads, benches and so on.
Worrying about how carbon taxes will affect the poor is absolutely legitimate, and that's coming from someone that thinks we need one yesterday. Calling it baseless propaganda probably says more about you than it does the argument in question.
As a more generous interpretation of ZeroGravitas' comment: As the bird-and-windmill example shows, those people "worrying" are thought of as denying the fundamental viability of carbon taxes and only use the poor as a popular argument. Worrying about progressive taxation effects is of course very important, but then again also pretty easy to mitigate. And considering the fact that the parties propagating carbon taxes are mostly also the parties caring about the poor, I'm not very worried that the poor will be willingly outpriced of their mobility needs here. After all, that new tax makes the very resources available that would be needed to mitigate the unequal burden it would create.
There's a fairly large contingent in tech that leans libertarian while also recognizing the impending climate disaster. A climate tax is simply accounting for the externalities of your actions.
I wouldn't at all assume that somebody on this site advocating for a carbon tax would take care to not make it regressive, and I think parent's lumping it in with bird strikes (a total red herring considering nobody is talking about banning cats or glass windows) and lithium ion mining (a failure to account for opportunity cost) is pretty conclusive.
Yes I am not from the US and thus I may be biased by the local political spectrum. Libertarianism is something uniquely US-American, I think. We do have bird strike protesters, though, and they pretty much all are from the right.
Article wasn't a surprise, so yes, I think it's pretty mainstream. Definitely recycle aluminium (very energy-intensive to extract), probably recycle glass and other metals, don't worry about anything else.
It is entirely dependent on where you live and local recycling demand. My city barely recycles any plastic despite what the markings on it might be, because it's not profitable to recycle certain plastics right now; supply is too high. Paper is fine though if it isn't greasy.
I end up putting mist of it in the trash bin, except glass or metal. It's too hard for me to know which goes what, how am I supposed to know what's compostable (I only have a broad understanding what composting is, and how it's done), much less if this plastic widget that came with the thing is a recyclable one, a compostable one, or made of styrene (which is neither). So off into the trash it goes.
It boggles my mind that modern fast food restaurants don't have a clear board above the multi-receptacle trash area telling you which bin each single-use item they serve goes into.
I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?
Probably, but in that case, they should be honest and just have a single receptacle.
OTOH, fast food joints are possibly one of the handful of places you could actually do recycling right, since you have a pretty uniform stream of items, thus limiting the need to sort. So instead of having a "recycling" bin, they could have a bin for plastic cutlery, and a bin for straws, and a bin for drink lids, with everything else going in a common trash.
Getting thousands of identical contaminated plastic forks that just need a wash before being melted down is probably a lot more appealing to a recycler than getting a bag that's a big jumble of contaminated junk.
Could also consider not throwing out food. I know servings in the US are huge, so either share the meal with another person or ask for a meal size that you can eat and no more.
Just want to say that my grandfather, while working at Hughes, was one of the earliest proponents of aluminum recycling, but everybody was mad at him because they had to pay CRV (which is a terribly-designed incentive actually). Then he was one of the earliest opponents of recycling plastics, and he received nearly universal excoriation, including from my own family. Now the facts are slowly trickling out of the cultural taboos, and perhaps rationality will prevail either way, but it’s been about 50 years now, and it seems like maybe cultural consensus on technical topics is a poor indicator of fact.
I think if we only used two kinds of plastic for food or consumer packaging, plastic recycling would make more sense, we unfortunately use like 10, which means s high labor cost for sorting.
Plus a myriad of additives in the plastic, plus various contaminants. Which makes it kind of hard of to recycle without seriously degrading the end product, even if we had everything nailed to spec and not the chaos we are in now.
I my book, we need to make energy production seriously cheap (renewables, plus maybe nuclear) and put some of the energy excess into transporting heavier but inert packaging such as glass, metal and carton. And by decree lock down the types of plastic and additives which are allowed to use.
In a 100% renewable economy, there will be a need for storable chemical energy for filling rare prolonged outages of wind and solar. Refuse, and in particular high energy density refuse like plastics (made from renewables feedstocks), would be good for this.
Part of the problem with landfill is that the economics are largely 'profit first, cost later'. We don't really have a good model to ensure that long term maintenance and care of a landfill site post closure is always adequately funded so there's always a risk that an owner who might well have made all his capital investment back, and more, before the landfill closed just runs out of money and walks away no matter how you provide privately. This is a bit like the issue you have with defined benefit pensions and longevity, only you have less certainty on the costs.
Because the potential environmental consequences of just leaving the site unmaintained or poorly looked after are high, in the developed world government almost always ends up providing a backstop to this. This could be described as 'socialised losses and privatised profits' when it gets used, and we would be right to be very wary of this model, even to pay a premium to avoid it.
I always thought there was a fortune to be made in buying the mining rights to old landfills.
I'd expect compressed old consumer goods to be a rich "ore" for many valuable materials compared to many natural sources, and having the mining operation there would provide an endgame for the landfill that ensured it was being monitored and managed.
The problem is that it assumes that mining operations are well regulated, which I suspect would not be the case.
I think the software analogy is not especially good, but it feels like there's some poorly-aligned incentives in landfill engineering. The point of landfills is to make trash invisible, so saving money by hiding engineering faults in the landfill itself is easy, they get buried along with the trash, and by the time the leakage becomes noticeable, the builder is long gone (bankrupt, merged/acquired, whatever), and the community is left to spend more on remediation than would have been required for prevention.
The solution to this sort of problem is generally regulation and oversight. I try not to be cynical about the utility of that approach, but it's hard.
The difference from software engineering is that, for landfills, the specifications don't change on the fly, and the engineering best-practices to build them actually exist.
I don’t think that’s analogous. I suspect there are numerous examples of landfills they don’t hurt the environment, and lots of well studied best practices for how to achieve that in others. The equivalent in software is a sort of spherical cow theoretical construct that nobody has seen, let alone knows how to systematically create.
While i 100% agree with your point, the (i'm assuming) highly regulated process of creating and running a landfill site doesnt have the same "fail fast, fail often", "MVP", "rapid development" culture that software does.
I once helped out a project which involved talking to a landfill operator. They mentioned that deer like to drink the water pooling in the landfill and theorized that it tasted "sweet." Of course, hunters then kill and eat these deer.
You absorb the heavy metals and other harmful components that the deer have been absorbing by drinking landfill leakage, which is kinda not good for your body.
Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills.
As mentioned elsewhere in this comment section, the right answer is for people to reduce first and recycle last. On that front, the west (and America in particular) is chief in exhaustion of resources and consumption.
[0] I originally said "half" which was just me using colorful speech. This comment deals with facts so I don't want to include a number and have people think it's literal.
Us sending our garbage to places like China, India, Indonesia has no bearing on us dumping our garbage in the ocean or not.
Those countries willingly bought our garbage and chose to dump whatever wasn't useful in the manner that they did, all by themselves. Insinuating that, if we didn't sell it, we'd also dump it in the ocean is more wishful(?) thinking than anything else.
The idea that there is a joined-up strategy at a national level to ‘buy our garbage’ is weak.
These countries have immature regulatory and inspection regimes and garbage is being bought and dumped by for-profit entities because they can get away with doing so. It’s really ugly capitalism.
> Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it
Ummmm, what is exported is all from the recycling stream. If it wasn't "recycled" it wouldn't get exported, and the importer wouldn't end up disposing of it in the ocean.
I.e. recycling causes more rubbish to end up in the ocean.
AFAIK first world countries are not supposed to export general rubbish, and third world countries are not supposed to import rubbish.
So while this is a problem, I doubt it's really all that related to landfills vs. recycling. Some of that exported waste was supposed to be recycled, almost certainly. It's likely that exporting for the purpose of recycling runs essentially the same risks, not to mention that you have to consider not just incompetence but outright malice too: why wouldn't a waste-processor not take stuff for recycling with the intent of never recycling in the first place? By the time the sender catches on, just let some intermediary go bankrupt, rinse, repeat.
Waste export problems have little to do with landfills vs. recycling. If anything, recycling has additional risks, because recycling is tricky and potentially labor intensive, making exports alluring, and because it has the veneer of cleanliness without good means to audit that.
However, if the argument is that exporting waste is generally speaking a bad idea, that obviously holds merit. International agreements, standards & cooperation obviously weren't robust&benign enough to ensure that works in the past, and all but the smallest of countries should be able to figure this stuff out themselves.
Other countries buying up trash used to be a big market, but it is declining at a reasonably solid rate, [1] being a good example. So in broad terms, the point in the original article still applies.
One thing to understand here is just how cheap it is for us to send our recycling/garbage overseas. All of those shipping containers coming over here need to get sent back with something and its not like Vietnam is buying an excess of American goods. So we end up paying next to nothing for this.
As a meta observation, he seems to assume that materials production and disposal would improve over time while recycling technology would not, and that the economics wouldn't change either. Some of the sources he cites for the inefficiency of recycling date from the 1990s and he's obliged to find something more recent.
Arguably recycling technology has more potential to improve since large-scale recycling efforts in the US have only been around since the 1980s. Landfills have been around forever.
Honest question: From a climate change point of view, burying anything that contains carbon is basically the definition of sequestering that carbon. Why is it bad to bury anything that contains carbon?
The obvious response, I think, would be that if we consume and bury 'stuff', then we'll just make more 'stuff', but what's wrong with that? Is it the energy required (presumably from burning fossil fuels) to produce more 'stuff' that's really the problem? It doesn't seem like we have the whole picture on how much energy is actually spent preparing recycled materials for re-use to make an accurate comparison.
Recyclable stuff make that connected though. Paper can be recycled a bunch of time, plastic too. Sure we can't reuse 100% of what we waste, but any percent is better than none.
True, but some landfills capture that methane and pump it back into the natural gas grid. I don't know the details of how efficient or widespread this type of capturing scheme is, but it seems to me like this is probably actually more sustainable than using natural gas from drilling and fracking.
You weren’t totally wrong, just not the most correct :)
I looked up the numbers, in the US, it’s something like 70% burn on-site for electricity, 20% burn in some nearby use (e.g. process steam or greenhouse warming) and 10% was cleaned up enough to pipe into the natural gas grid.
The British Plastics Federation have a nice (well, colourful) page on their website detailing the various ways plastic
goods and packaging can be reused, recycled, etc - https://www.bpf.co.uk/packaging/recycling.aspx
To quote from that page: "Disposal: No plastics should be put in landfill. Currently 26% of all plastic in the UK still goes to landfill" ... so if the plastics industry itself has finally got the message that burying their product (or dumping it in the sea) is not a good idea, I don't think I'd want to change their thinking by introducing them to ideas about carbon sequestration in landfills.
Enforcing landfills is a government problem, but recycling is a free market problem.
Mining 1 ton of iron takes 2 tons of ore plus another couple tons of coke and lime. It takes 4 tons of bauxite for one ton of aluminum (plus all the other things). There's also a huge amount of cost involved in reaching those tons of ore.
When mining a landfill gives bigger returns than the current deposits for the same cost of extraction, we'll see our recycling problem go away. Remaining burnables will simply reduce the amount of coal/coke needed to refine.
Government is critical in enforcing landfills though. Otherwise, trash winds up in little piles everywhere (or worse, in the ocean).
Shipping by rail and sea is incredibly efficient. Some googling tells me rail is 471 ton-miles per gallon. The average American produces 1600 lbs of trash per year, so you can ship one person's trash for a year almost 600 miles with one gallon of fuel. Even long-distance trash transportation is a negligible contributor to someone's oil use.
Hmm, that's probably a good point. NYC residents likely have little use for compost. And having to wheel bales (?) of dried poop out of your flat could get a bit annoying. Then again, presumably they already take out their trash, so maybe it's not totally unfeasible?
It's difficult to fully sterilize the compost, and it's very easy to end up with compost that is full of pathogens and parasites. With millions of people in a small area, I think that alone makes this idea infeasible.
The toilets also don't produce bales of dried poop, the composting only partially completes in the toilet itself--it has to be completed outside in a compost heap.
Also dry composting toilets tend to produce more odors than the average person wants to deal with in their small living space.
> Plastics come from oil, which we are gradually running out of, though not quickly.
I guess it depends on your definition of "quickly", or it would be good to see a citation on this one.
Personally, I believe that if we encourage recycling more, that creates an opportunity for companies to innovate in that space and come up with better recycling methods. So in that respect, I'd prefer to over-recycle than under-recycle.
There's a reason that Recycle comes last in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle": it's the least desirable option.
If you Reduce, you get an easy win by not needing the resource in the first place; Reuse achieves orders of magnitude of efficiency in the resource's utility (a glass mason jar can be used thousands of times, compared to a plastic one designed to used once and disposed). Recycling is often fraught with inefficiencies of both energy and waste byproducts.
I would love to see more economic incentives around direct reuse (such as Pigovian taxes on disposable plastics, and consumer incentives to return glassware to the grocer and then the manufacturer for direct reuse).
The issues with mason jars and ceramic cup ends up being the amount of energy required to fire the oven. This ends up putting you in a deep hole when it comes to accounting energy inputs, as consumer plastics are essentially repurposed refinery waste.
This leaves you with the choice to either spend a lot of energy or risk environmental contamination. Chemical accounting ends up being a nontrivial problem to address.
I love plastics bags because they get multiple uses in my house as lunch sacks, garbage can liners, etc. those are things that I would have to buy otherwise but now I get to resuse cheap plastics.
On a related point this green new deal housing plan that is being mooted will presumably mandate 200 years design life and much stricter build quality to reduce energy use?
Plastics are a negligible use of oil (compared to transportation), oil can be synthesized, and I assume methane feedstock is adequate for making plastics.
> I guess it depends on your definition of "quickly", or it would be good to see a citation on this one.
A citation in your favor would be how net energy output only slowly declines as EROI plummets[1]. Slow decline is a general property of these types ”Seneca Cliffs”[2] present in collapse.
There should be law that makes companies directly responsible for what happens to their packaging materials. Whatever a company brings into this world is their responsibility to recycle. Yes it adds overhead, but it makes people a lot more aware, and forces them to take responsibility of the impact they are having.
Why shouldn’t packaging be designed to be easily transformed into something useful, or even into functional community art projects?
A temple of coke cans for example. If they going to last forever it might as well be in a form that benefits communities.
Plastics have already been banned in certain countries.
Or are there to many lobbying in the wrong direction?
three main issues: 1) yes the Earth is huge but cities really don't have easy access to landfill, and many are in fact running out of it because transporting garbage is expensive. 2) podcasts aren't convincing sources for a debate. 3) the real debate is "how do we reduce waste", not "landfill vs recycling".
>But the labor costs in developed economies discourages that
Which is a perfect example of poorly priced externalities. The full cost of disposal should be priced into everything produced. It is completely backwards that throwing a glass bottle in the trash is cheaper than sterilizing and re-using it.
Not really. A => B doesn't imply that not-A => not-B.
Total number of jobs or time spent in the labour market is one thing, but ultimately what we care about is efficiently creating utility. If I need to spend 5h working to get enough money to replace something I could've fixed in 0.5h, that's not good for the economy as a whole.
Were it otherwise, every home would be built without a kitchen and people would go out to eat all the time. We'd need more jobs for people staffing the kitchens, but it wouldn't help people overall.
> Were it otherwise, every home would be built without a kitchen and people would go out to eat all the time. We'd need more jobs for people staffing the kitchens, but it wouldn't help people overall.
Isn't the 'ready meal' phenomenon essentially this? Someone else does the real cooking, you just store then heat it up. Plenty of people survive solely, or mostly, on that.
Seems to me that your two points oppose each other. If the cost of repair is too high because of labor costs, that indicates that it would create jobs, not destroy them.
This seems inspired by the recent double episode of the popular podcast planet money, and some contrarian gotcha that we all like to do. Is the npr also infiltrated by the kocks?
That's just magical thinking. Nothing suggests that it is in the realm of possibility.
What is the energy potential in the materials in a landfill? How much is wasted by scouring them and trying to properly extract it? Compared to preventing the capture of those materials there in the first place?
Putting the survival of our species on the possibility of some pixie dust is not rational. It is hard to face the truth, but burying your head in the sand is counter-productive.
If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.
There are a lot of elements in that story that don't quite make sense to me.
Taking care of the best planet around is always going to be easier and better than packing everybody off to some other planet, even one that's just as good.
They way I see it, it's even going to be possible to even collect all the mercury out of the ocean and clean up other seemingly impossible messes.
"By contrast, reusable metal straws and canvas bags require something like 10-100x the energy and materials to manufacture, and need regular cleaning to avoid spreading disease. So unless you use them many times, they end up being worse for the environment. I lose them much faster than that, and have better things to do with my attention than remember to bring bags with me everywhere I go, so I just use those old-school plastic bags whenever I can."
This is not a valid argument. A bad habit should not be a justification for a devious behavior.
I would even argue it is easier to bring your reusable container of choice when going shopping, and if that habit is really formed, then you wont be able to exit your home or car without it, because something will seem to be missing.
Take for example the backpack or "granny cart". They are much more comfortable to use when compared to lugging around many plastics bags around your hands, and the granny cart is much better for your back.
tl;dr: As a sustainable (heh!) solution to the current waste crisis, landfilling everything is not a good solution. We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today. The only people who will benefit from a 'landfill everything' strategy will be 23rd century archaeologists.
As the UK is mentioned a couple of times in the article, I'll add a link to the Wikipedia article on UK National Waste Strategies, as it includes links to the various strategies published by various Governments across the UK since 2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Waste_Strategy
While those documents are a bit on the long side, they are very informative about the many, many (many!) complex systems that contribute to planning for, managing, and attempting to reduce waste in a large, rich European nation state.
(Disclaimer: I was part of the team that developed and published the Waste Strategy for England in 2000).
We tried it for many centuries and are still paying the price for that approach today.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of centuries-old landfills clogging up the landscape and (to any meaningful extent) impinging upon the availability of land.
Happily. Old landfill sites are not built to modern standards and are thus liable to erode, with the potential to contaminate the surrounding areas with a range of interesting toxins. They can also collapse (if they contained a significant amount of biodegradable waste) which is unfortunate if your house is built on top of it.
A quick Google search gave me this link to some ongoing research conducted by Queen Mary College, London, into the risks surrounding historic landfills - https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/histo... - that page does a far better job of explaining the situation than I can.
Exactly. It’s like saying that old sewage systems were not built to modern standards and that led to disease transmission. Therefore sewage systems are bad. That is the whole point of “modern standards”.
There will always be a need for landfill sites. And the current standards for their construction, use and end-of-life maintenance are vastly higher than they were 20 years ago.
Sadly, making sure operational/new landfill sites stick to the standards doesn't fix the problems surrounding old/abandoned landfill sites. If people want to make those sites safe(r), then that's going to cost a lot of money.
In my view, the key barriers to landfill mining are the same as those faced by today's recycling industry: the costs involved in extracting value from waste (someone has to pay the pickers working in the recycling sheds - possibly one of the worst jobs in the world); and finding viable, stable and sustainable markets for the materials that do get extracted. Volatile recyclate markets were a huge problem for sustainable recycling back in 2000 and I doubt much has changed since then.
Two of this article's sources are John Tierney who has had it out against recycling since the 90s, and has written other anti-environmentalist pieces, including a hit piece on Rachel Carson in 2007 that sang the praises of DDT spraying in third world countries [1]. For a takedown of the FUD in that one see [2].
Simply put if this author trusts Tierney it's a reason not to trust this author.
Every time I clean a yogurt container I feel torn. What is a better environmental trade-off: not running water for 90 seconds or recycling the plastic? I think it would be really helpful if there was some kind of universal unit that would describe the real environmental impact of producing, trashing, recycling of goods and materials.
The unit would appear on packagings of goods, specs of materials, landfill/recycling bins etc. I created a pdf to visualize the idea (all values in the pdf are made up): https://www.dropbox.com/s/rdi51serx6hwn8e/EarthHarm.pdf?dl=0 I realize how complex such a project would be. Inherently, the choice of how the unit works would be a political one. How to compare and calculate the different environmental challenges and wrap them up in one unit? What institution would have enough authority and expertise to deploy it? Setting this all aside, I think unit like this would be a really helpful tool letting people have some baseline they can refer to. It could inform people what is the impact of their actions and where to seek for a real change. (a simpler version of this project would be a well-researched website that compares these environmental factors with each other)
1. The rate of municipal waste landfilling for the 32 EEA member countries fell from 49 % in 2004 to 34 % in 2014.
2. Overall, the rates of landfilling decreased in 27 out of 32 countries. Between 2004 and 2014, the largest decreases occurred in Estonia (57 percentage points), Finland (41 percentage points), Slovenia (41 percentage points) and the United Kingdom (41 percentage points).
Not a single person in the world (rounded down – I’m sure you might be able to find someone) is opposed to people using plastic straws for medical purposes. Just as not a single person in the world is opposed to allowing disabled people access via cars, even if in general cars might not be allowed.
These kinds of arguments are such obvious strawmen. I‘m always so confused when people use them, apparently even in good faith, thinking they hold any kind of water. I’m always disappointed when someone uses arguments like that, it’s so absurd.
Overall I would just argue that straw bans and the like are often not enough or waste valuable political capital, even if they might be effective. That much is certainly true. The focus on personal responsibility is toxic and derailing since climate change categorically cannot be solved with appeals to personal responsibility.
The UK is banning straws but will still allow people to buy straws from pharmacies. That seems like a good balance.
Our local high street only allow disabled drivers to park. So the 'pedestrianised' high street is full of the cars of disabled drivers. That doesn't seem to be such a good balance.
Ps I feel there's a good rhyme hiding somewhere with your straw man straw ban.
Slightly off-topic and irrelevant for many urban people (or suburban with strict association rules) but it's possible to reduce your food waste to literally zero by keeping 2 or 3 or 4 laying hens.
Every bit of leftover food scraps are just thrown at the chickens ... and turned into eggs.
It's so pleasing and efficient that if I am at a function with food scraps and it is simple and unobtrusive to do so, I will bring home the scraps to save them from the landfill (and turn into eggs).
It’s never been a challenge to recycle organic matter like leftovers, as far as I’m aware — regardless of whether you use animals or a compost heap. It’s the plastics and metals that are difficult to handle.
> Incinerating waste and generating electricity from it is an alternative form of rubbish disposal that is good for the environment and solves the problem permanently, but expensive to operate up front.
well, I think you are slightly off the mark there.
If pumping out more CO2 that would normally be sequestered, or dumping out a boat load of particulates with nitrogen dioxide is an environmental thing, then yes.
My heating and how water did come from a very well run incinerator, but its not exactly the paragon of cleanliness.
It's more nuanced: environmentally landfills literally displace acreage of environment (which in my semi-uneducated opinion is often overstated) and have sporadic local issues e.g. material leaching into ground water.
Whereas power generated from incineration of trash displaces CO2 emissions from fossil fuel emissions.
'''Do the benefits of incinerating trash for electricity outweigh the costs thereof in comparison with costs of equivalent conventional electricity and costs of burying aforementioned trash?''' Absolute issues (e.g. NOx or CO2 emission) not in the context of opportunity cost are irrelevant to misleading.
>Properly run landfill doesn’t hurt the environment in itself.
>[...] But a well run landfill site has [...] electricity generation from gases produced by decaying matter,
This sounds like a pipe dream. We don't even have reliable estimates on how much landfill outgas there is, much less a good system for burning it. It's believed to be largely methane, which would be valuable without further processing if it could be captured.
Incidentally, the word "methane" does not appear in the article at all, and no systems describing such a gas capture apparatus are mentioned. But just think about it: a landfill is enormous; they are some of the largest things humans ever build, and some of them are visible from low Earth orbit. How do you plan to capture all of the gas coming out of that? Be honest!
Meanwhile, incinerators (of various designs) work today, have almost all of the upsides of landfills with none of the downsides. The article dismisses incineration with a single reference (b), which is actually an article from Planet Money focusing on recycling. The actual source is probably a footnote within a footnote, because that's as much attention as Americans will pay to incineration, I guess.
I agree that we need to talk about recycling less, but the correct alternative is incineration, not landfills.
I mean, to answer your methane question - after our local landfill was filled up, it was covered with foil, then several layers of soil and finally grass - it's a public park nowadays. The methane is collected at the highest point of the hill that was the landfill, I imagine the layer of foil forces it to go up to the single outpipe at the top.
Yes, there really are several successful companies who specialise in landfill gas recovery, it's profitable and practical. But I don't think it's neccessarily a reason to continue with landfill in itself.
“Reusable straws and bags are often more resource intensive than single-use ones. Ever noticed that plastic bags and straws are both incredibly thin and incredibly cheap? Almost no resources go into making each one — it’s kind of amazing.“
I’m confused by these new plastic bag rules in some cities. What is the underlying reasoning that was used to advocate for them?
It was this section of the posted article which caught my attention:
“The problem of rubbish polluting the sea, rivers and land can be most cheaply addressed by improving rubbish collection and making sure everything gets to landfill.
Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for almost no new waste reaching the oceans.
Focussing on recycling is a distraction from making sure everything gets collected and cheaply buried underground — something which many countries already do successfully.”
I find it maddening to get accurate information on recycling
- what can be recycled?
- what state can that material be in (cleanliness, prewashing)?
- is it being recycled or just being shipped off to china or burned?
- what efficiencies are involved in the various materials?
This seems to change on a year-by-year basis (for example, china stopped taking our trash, uh recycling).
Currently I desperately try to turn single use plastics to double-use. Plastic bags and covering can be used as poop bags, wrap for trash that could drip, and to hold more trash.
I try to use used paper towels for washing dishes and wiping up counters, and also for gross trash.
Most plastic containers of food from stores and takeout can be reused a few times for leftover storage and other purposes.
Best thing about double-use is that it usually helps ensure the single use plastic stays in the landfill by weighing it down.
I also think that recycling allows companies to waste more, because consumers are more comfortable generating recycling waste than landfill waste, even though for plastics there isn't really much you can do to recycle them.
Landfills should be utilized much less for municipal waste, but doing this would require much better waste separation.
It's probably better to burn or recycle things that don't decompose readily, such as plastic. Landfilling plastics just takes up a lot of space for a long time. Recycling or burning plastic also reduces litter.
Recycling paper doesn't matter as much, since it is very biodegradable. I suspect that recycling paper leads to energy savings in the pulp & paper industry.
Aluminum is one of the best candidates for recycling as it is very efficient and cuts down on the need for aluminum ore. Steel is somewhat less efficient.
There is a lot of talk about sequestering carbon to reduce the problems of increased atmospheric CO2. Burning plastic seems to be the exact opposite of that.
>Landfilling plastics just takes up a lot of space for a long time.
Is that really an issue when said space can still be used for parks or other green spaces? Besides, US is a really big place. As long as we're not burying it too close to urban centers it should be fine.
This article gave a different look at landfills and was honestly quiet eye opening for me. I had not considered the effects recycling could have if not done correctly, and what benefits landfills have when monitored well.
This is why markets should make decisions about this stuff (with appropriate taxes for externalities) rather than politicians with their gut instinct...
"We're doing nothing for the environment" doesn't get one elected tho...
Yeah we live in the time where companies look quarter to quarter....or are rewarded by the market by growing like Uber where profits don't even matter.
Not sure we can hope for them to look into the future very far / care.
The likes of Uber are valued highly precisely because investors are looking very far into the future where these companies might become highly profitable.
Markets work based on information. Lack of information causes consumers to buy something they don't want to buy, e.g. negative effects on the environment. Markets should be controlled in a such way that the seller must tell what they are selling, including environmental effects, and they must not lie.
Markets have no interest in environmental outcomes, and most consumers have greedy ones at best. There needs to be some oversight to ensure optimal outcomes for all.
I think the argument that he has better things to do then think of taking a bag "everythere". You do not need a bag small in hand purchases and when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping.
When it comes to regulations I would trust the US with nothing. The EU has probably way better regulations for landfills like for food and other things. While at the same time probably do a way better job at actual recycling.
>when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping.
There's a Danish study[1] that concluded that reusable bags require 50+ uses before breaking even with disposable plastic bags. And that's for one use. If you reuse the disposable bag once (to line your garbage bin, for example), the break even point is now 100+ uses. If you factor in cleaning costs for the reusable bags, I'd be surprised if this practice makes a dent on pollution, if at all.
I don't exactly understand what you are saying but the report you linked shows that the non-reusable plastic bags reach the same negative impact on climate change 150 times faster than reusable cotton bags. How is that good?
When you talk about breaking even you are talking about reaching the same negative impact, I hope, because that's what the report is about.
They even spell out those negative impacts: ozone depletion, terrestrial eutrophication, freshwater eutrophication and water use.
That is a very selective interpretation of that paper.
The study found that some types of reusable bag needed many uses before being a better environmental option than thin plastic bags (e.g. cotton). Other bags, such as sturdier plastic bags designed for reuse were much better options, needing only a few uses to break even, environmentally speaking.
Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
>Other bags, such as sturdier plastic bags designed for reuse were much better options, needing only a few uses to break even, environmentally speaking.
"a few uses" is only true when you're only considering climate change. it's 50+ when you consider all factors.
>Anyway, 50+ (or 100+) uses - a year or two of weekly shopping - does not seem unreasonable for a cotton bag.
The issue here is that at 1 shopping trip per week, it's a little under 2 years to break even with disposable bags plastic bags (assuming you reuse the disposable bag once). To actually make a 50% reduction, you'd need to use it for 4 years. That's a lot of hassle (remembering to bring along the bags, storing it, etc.) for very little benefit (in absolute terms), considering how little materials are in each plastic bag. For instance, according to the table on page 55, each bag has greenhouse effect equivalent to 0.11kg of co2. Over 400 uses with 50% savings, that's 22kg of co2 saved. With the current market price for carbon offset credits (quick search puts it at $25/ton), that's $0.55 saved over 4 years. You might be able to scale that out to 10 bags, but that's still pretty low.
6 billion fewer plastic bags were issues in the UK after they started getting taxed. That's only a small amount of CO2 saved per bag, but not negligible on a national scale, and it's completely avoidable.
Plus you only have to have a very small percentage out of 6 billion bags escaping the standard refuse system for them to become an environmental problem in themselves.
That study only looked at resource usage, and not the consequences of carelessly discarded shopping bags clogging up rivers and beaches.
The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
>and not the consequences of carelessly discarded shopping bags clogging up rivers and beaches.
1. plastic garbage winding up in rivers is largely a developing country problem. I don't see many plastic bags (if at all) in my local waterways.
2. why not just responsibly dispose of those bags? It's not hard. They're not going to get lost when you're using them. After that, you're probably home, or at least some place with a garbage bin.
>The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.
Are you suggesting people to make DIY cotton bags from scrap fabric they find themselves? You might be able to avoid the high costs of cotton (break even of 7000+ uses), but if you're not into arts and crafts, I suspect the opportunity cost will eat up any savings (if any).
>"why not just responsibly dispose of those bags? It's not hard."
And yet a lot of people carelessly throw away their plastic bags. Their laziness trumps your "it's not hard". Something primarily being a problem in developing countries is not an excuse for not caring about it.
"I don't see any, so it must not be a problem" is not a valid argument. If you've ever tried to remove a plastic bag that was half-buried in sand, you would know. That bag could sit there for hundreds of years without degrading.
My point is that it's better to not have new bags/material made at all. Repurpose something that was already made and used for other purposes, and you lessen the footprint. It doesn't have to be cotton, the woven bags made from recycled plastic are quite durable and long-lasting. In my case, I do have cotton shopping bags, but they're all hand-me-downs from family, I would never buy a brand-new one.
If you want something made from upcycled sail cloth or similar repurposed materials, there are a number of companies who will happily sell you some, including customization.
Remember, it's "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order.
Brag, I've been reusing the same backpack from high school for over a decade. It carries about 30l or 16lbs of fluids, I've had the zippers repaired once, and I probably use it at least one a week.
> I lose them much faster than that, and have better things to do with my attention than remember to bring bags with me everywhere I go, so I just use those old-school plastic bags whenever I can.
And so ultimately people (consumers) get what they want. If you don’t want to commit to taking steps in a more sustainable fashion, then you contribute to the problem of disposable waste.
Or do electronics fall under metals and are worth recycling. Or if tossed we could always mine landfills for iPhones in the future, which the article touches upon.
As an aside, this article seems to only be about minimizing energy use or cost and not about maximizing sustainability.
>>> Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices, such as China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100% and are responsible for almost no new waste reaching the oceans.
... Yea, b/c the developed nations of the world don't send their trash to "poorer riverine countries" to get dumped in the ocean. /s
It's not clear that this article makes a relevant point.
The existence of trash isn't under dispute in the article, only a very specific route for trash to reach the ocean. It's not clear that somehow exporting trash, alone, implicates western countries in its reaching the ocean.
Is it mismanaged trash collecting companies in developing countries that dump in the ocean? Is that the route? Or is it dumping in rivers, as the article suggests.
The real problem is we are using a long term material for short term purposes only because it seems cheap. All plastic will be with us for generations if not forever in terms of human time. We can and should produce an alternative and not poison the environment if we work at it. Yes it's not as bad as we thought but it certainly is bad. Plastic has a place in our daily life but not as a use once and throw away.
I'm one that believes the use of taxes as way to change consumption. So charging a tax to help reflect the true value of plastic, to reduce usages and find alternatives. It's a hard issue but burning it or dumping is not the solution.
We're annually putting hundreds of megatons of plastic into the environment, much of it reduced to microscopic particles and fibers. I think we're going to see increasing adaptation of microorganisms to eating the stuff, to the point it all becomes biodegradable.
We used to use glass, which doesn't really break down biologically, just mechanically (you can turn it back to sand) - I think we ought to be using all the plastic we make as some sort of fuel for power generation, it burns quite readily.
Landfills are going to become a gold mine when someone finally invents a Wall-E robot. With the advances in AI going on right now, it seems like a feasible thing to happen soon.
This is just so far out. "AI" is currently expert systems and we are seeing its limitations (see setbacks in autonomous driving). It has nowhere near the potential to drive the search and extraction of energy sources in landfills.
To me, the idea of a narrow purpose garbage robot operating in the confines of a landfill sounds more plausible than a self-driving car meant to operate an "open world" scenario populated by other AI and humans alike (aka streets with car, bikes and pedestrians on them). And a lot less dangerous to human life too when they are buggy.
Sure, depends only on your ethic.
E.G (note devils advocate)
A utilitarist might argue, that killing of a larger amount of humans that are not worth it might be for the greater good of all
A extremist fascist even has a pretty clear definition of worth added to that
Asimovs concept of being killed instead of retirement
Various concepts in fiction of adding globally some additions to drinking water to lower fertility on global scale
Chinas politic of one child per family was even somewhat fair as it discriminates equally
This is true enough (in some markets and some circumstances, yada yada), but sort of missing the point. A world where all the Good Liberals are trained to recycle everything into hand sorted artisinal bins that they keep next to their compost containers is one where people think about what they purchase and push for public policies that worry about resource consumption in ways that benefit all of us.
A world (we live in it) where libertarians tell everyone that "landfill is underrated" is one where people buy and dispose of way too much junk, and create the problems all us communists are vainly trying to solve via personal recycling.
I mean, sure, a world of scientists might be able to handle rules like "recycling that aluminum can is a big win, but the polypropylene bottle with the same product in it is mostly a wash". A world of real people is just going to hear "throw out all the things".
Container deposit for aluminum works pretty well. Steel is relatively easy to extract from trash with magnets. Separating methane producing non-toxic waste might be meaningful too. But having people wash/transport/sort plastics which can't be recycled is bad, and shouldn't be incentivised. Making corporations pay for non-recyclable plastic is a market mechanism which fiscal conservatives should applaud.
Casting this as a goody Lefty vs selfish conservative argument is pointless.
> Making corporations pay for non-recyclable plastic is a market mechanism which fiscal conservatives should applaud.
Citation needed. That sounds like socialist insanity to me. So sure, I applaud it. I just don't see these "conservatives" you are taking about. Even at the level of local politics this tends to be a partisan issue. And you sure sound like a democrat to me...
Conservatives always decry some group getting something for free, which is actually paid for by the taxpayer. Distributing non-recyclable plastic and forcing rate payers to pay to dump it, collect it from rivers and drains etc is it be such case.
A market mechanism uses the power of the market to encourage correct behavior through market forces, instead of penalties, taxes on all, special schemes to give cash to specific state controlled recycling projects, etc. A market mechanism allows free enterprise solutions, whereas 'social insanity' creates inflexible regulatory processes.
Reusing and recycling are tactical.
If your strategy is in place, use all the tactics that contribute to it. But if you don't have your strategy in place, tactics can do nothing or even move you backward.
Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.
We are stepping on the gas, thinking we're stepping on the brake.
Covered in episode 183 of Leadership and the Environment: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues-volume...