Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.
Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.
While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use.
> Friendly reminder that modern, well regulated landfills are actually fine and there is plenty of space for them.
I guess this depends on your tax bracket and political bargaining power. I grew up smelling (and smelling like) solid waste trucked in from the waste treatment facility for the richer suburbs in a racially segregated metro area. The less PC way of sating that is "concentrated rich 95% white person shit".
And let me tell you: despite what they think, MD/JD/MBA shit does not smell like roses. The smell permeated the entire community for days at a time, every month. I also now have a whole set of recommended annual cancer screenings. All from a modern and well regulated landfill that is still in operation.
I shit you not: we had movie days in high school that corresponded with the worse smelling days. Just whole days/weeks of lost learning, regularly, because the whole place smelled like literal human shit.
Now I live in a snow white upper middle class suburb and those problems are behind me, but I'm still very conscious about where my waste really ends up and have gone to war in more than city council meeting about where our literal shit ends up.
But, again, if you have a FAANG salary then your shit and trash will be shipped to someone else's community and it's not your problem. Waste away! /s
I lived near waste center myself (sewage treatment plant in Bayview SF) with all the smells it emitted, but I'm still really glad it exists!
It definitely should be regulated to not offgas like that, but we can/should solve those problems. It wouldn't even be that hard - probably like $10-50M or so.
We need to address the lack of true democratic representation in those communities allows those problems to persist. It's not because of lack of tech or finance.
You seem to be conflating landfills (where trash that's trucked away from your curb goes to be buried) and sewage treatment plants (where the stuff you put down your pipes goes to be processed into clean water, fertilizer, and "other"). They are completely different things.
I once looked at apartments in Bayview and I feel like you're really underselling how bad it smells. If it were a vast open container of raw sewage, I would not be surprised.
I'm shocked humans are allowed to live there. Nothing that smells that bad could possibly be safe.
Also that whole area is a liquefaction zone, so when the earthquake happens, I'm sure it'll be a bio-hazard disaster.
And that's before accounting for the radioactive waste the US Navy dumped at Hunter's Point. There's a reason why the life expectancy of a black man in San Francisco is 20 years less than that of other men in the city, and actually worse than the life expectancy of black men nationwide.
Anyways, snark aside: if this was for decades during your formative years, and you were close enough to be regularly exposed to runoff, please start getting regular cancer screenings.
If it was just a few years in your 20s you're probably fine (per the EPA, but maybe also screen).
That’s a solvable problem though. Regulations could be changed to require more buffer areas for the landfill.
Also, another thing to think about it is that your parents likely picked the best place available for their means. Not many people choose to live next to landfills if they can afford something better. Had the landfill not existed, your parents would have likely needed to live next to some other type of hazard. It’s unfortunate, but a reality of our economic system.
That's a heck of a dystopian view, TBH. Be glad it was just the landfill, otherwise it might have been a nuclear dump? Welp, guess that's just economics, nothing we can do about that, poor unlucky rubes!
I know you didn't mean it that way, but it can sound extraordinarily tone-deaf to talk down to people like this.
A lot of people on the Internet would rather be right than liked. The medium lends itself to this: there's little point in having random people you will never meet like you.
I thought OP was making an interesting point about economics, personally - that there's sort of a law of "conservation of unpleasantness" in a market economy, and if it wasn't the landfill, there would be some other thing objectionable about your property. You approach your career very differently (and by capitalist standards, usually more successfully) if you figure that you're going to dislike some things anyway, but might as well be deliberate in choosing what you dislike.
It's not necessarily about being liked; that's part of our current culture's narcissism problem. It's about what kind of society do you want to live in. Do you want to live in a society where the prevailing attitude ranges from the personal "welp, sucks to be you! be grateful you have anything at all you gutter trash" to the non-personal "it's unfortunate this machine runs on frickaseed baby faces, well I guess there's nothing we can do".
To be clear, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect here, not accusing.
It'd be great if our society could move past those two sides of the same coin to a more "oh, look, here's an area where people are getting screwed, maybe we can fix that". That's a kind of problem-solving attitude focused on people, not a popularity contest.
> Also, another thing to think about it is that your parents likely picked the best place available for their means. Not many people choose to live next to landfills if they can afford something better. Had the landfill not existed, your parents would have likely needed to live next to some other type of hazard. It’s unfortunate, but a reality of our economic system.
Yes, it's my parent's fault for being poor. (Actually, not poor, just not upper middle class in the wrong metro, although most of my colleagues from university onwards called it "working class" so maybe so.) Unfortunate, but reality :-|
Not sure about your second point. Let’s consider an oversimplifying example where population is homogenous in an area/nation. If 50% of the land is unpleasant, then 50% of the population will live next to unpleasant stuff. If only 20% is unpleasant, 20% will love, saving 30% of the population.
Managing a landfill/sewage plant can be worthwhile.
Yeah I lived in Mountain View and it smelled like garbage. Apparently the shoreview outdoor event venue had to mitigate some of the outgassing at one point because you could light the methane coming out of the ground on fire.
And I’d be willing to bet that the cities that exist like this are controlled by one political party and the population happily keeps voting to keep them in power.
I was just in Thailand... where you can't drink the water. So you buy plastic water bottles constantly. All the rivers and waterways are just full of plastic bottles floating everywhere.
Normally, homes have water purifiers or get large reused bottles. Small bottles are used by tourist/travellers. Though, yeah waste segregation and disposal is a problem.
You would need a very expensive filtering system for most South East asian water supplies to reach western safety standards. Boiling, bathing and washing is what that water is used for.
> Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.
That reference isn't exactly justifying your statement. AFAICT that research is just comparing the relative amounts of plastic going to the ocean _from rivers_. Rivers are not the only way that plastic gets into the ocean.
Eh, we ship a lot of waste overseas and we delocalised a lot of industries there too. Rich countries are definitely part of the problem, it's too easy to say we don't have a role in this and point our fingers to Asia and Africa... it's time to start taking responsabilities
In a conventional money based economy demand is always below supply because of structural reasons that have to do with how our money works.
Since there must be losers, people don't want to be a 80% winner and 20% loser, they want to be a 100% winner and let a whole person be a 100% loser instead.
Any policy that aims at eliminating poverty has to ensure that supply and demand are in balance.
The 2018 Scientific American article states that "more than a quarter" comes from ten rivers in Asia. That means more than half, at least 2/3, comes from somewhere else.
The following year, in 2019, The Guardian stated that Greenpeace said most ocean pollution comes from "ghost gear", dumped fishing gear, not rivers in Asia.
> Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.
I don't have a source for this, so take it for what it's worth, but as I recall rich countries remain a significant part of the problem. TFA mentions it, but, iirc, the US used to ship its plastic waste to China for recycling, but the "single stream" approach to recycling resulted in a contaminated waste stream that was more expensive to handle. So China stopped accepting our recyclable waste. In turn, we started shipping our recyclables to Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries instead. They're happy for the business, but they don't have the infra to handle the amount of waste we're sending, and general mismanagement is widely recognized [0]. As a result US plastic waste intended for "recycling" ends up in dump sites, landfills, etc. in SEA countries and eventially accumulates in rivers, sewers, and eventually the ocean.
I don't disagree with you regarding landfills. There was a post here recently that seemed to lean more towards just throwing plastic away, that way it ends up in a landfill, rather than "recycling" it and having it end up in the ocean by way of the Philippines
Since you mention it, there's a surprising effort to remove plastic from the ocean too: https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-... It's definitely a drop in the bucket, but a nice improvement over the we-can't-do-anything attitude previously on the pacific garbage patch
I don’t think you know what your talking about. For instance, Victoria BC, the capital of British Columbia, Canada, didn’t have a waste sewage plant for the city until 2021. I’m quite sure many rich countries are still significantly polluting the land, sea, and air.
Probably the former, given the hysteria about running out of landfill space was partially the reason why there was a push to recycle in the 80s.
>GONZALEZ: There were all these stats coming out at the time that showed that the number of landfills in America was plummeting. Landfills were closing, and people kept citing these stats in stories about the garbage barge.
>KINNAMAN: And so people put it all together, and in their minds, the conclusion was that the United States is running out of landfill space. The United States was full - that we couldn't store any more.
>[...]
>GONZALEZ: OK. Here's what else was happening at the time. Yes, landfills were closing, but that was because there were new rules for landfills - stricter rules to protect the environment. The EPA said you now have to do things like line the bottom of landfills with plastic so they don't contaminate the groundwater.
>KINNAMAN: And so the old town dump - every little town had one - was out of compliance. You can't accept garbage in here anymore. It's illegal. And so these town dumps were closing by the dozens.
>GONZALEZ: But in their place, regional landfills were becoming a thing - bigger landfills that could accept trash while still following all of these new rules. The Natural Resources Defense Council says there used to be about 10,000 dumps in the mid-'80s and that now we have less than 3,000. But we were not running out of space then, and we still aren't running out of space. Thomas says we probably have thousands of years of landfill space left in the U.S. And even hardcore environmentalists reluctantly agree that, yeah, we have a lot of space left. But people thought we were running out of space, and that was what mattered.
>KINNAMAN: And so the recycling era was born. This is when state government said, we're going to require cycling to - recycling to occur.
When you run out of space in a landfill you send some engineers and excavator operators out and dig a new one. The three reasons not to do that, as given by your article, are (paraphrasing) "permits and environmental regulations take a long time," "communities don't like it," and "it's bad for the environment."
If the rubbish starts piling up, in the US or elsewhere, then all three of those issues are going to be quickly ignored in favour of digging another hole and adding the bare minimum of leachate collection.
I think that is just referring to the existing landfills. We can/do build new landfills all the time. And there is no shortage of unused space for new landfills.
There's a sizeable part of the environmental movement (collapsik / degrowthers) that like to create and spread this kind of FUD and propaganda, which is a shame because environmental issues are very real / important, and we don't need idiots making up anything to support the cause.
There's plenty of evidence everywhere, though not all of it supports their Neo-Malthusian impulse, which is their true pain and cause.
The reason why “fake news” caught on so well is that so much of the news is indeed actually bullshit. Usually shocking sounding things which are half true at best. I bet you could come up with a statistic that says the landfills will be full. I also bet that this is a problem which will be solved in it’s time.
Local man has no idea what he’s going to have for lunch next Saturday! …so?
Your comment makes me wonder if people just haven’t had a chance to travel within the US. Except for the coastal cities, for the most part, US is empty.
There’s a difference in west empty and east empty. Out west you get miles and miles of literally empty desert - back east you get miles and miles of sparsely populated areas, but still houses every mile or so.
Unless you build the landfill in the remote western deserts, it's going to be in someone's backyard, which means condemning them and their kids to all kinds of health problems.
And shipping solid waste halfway across the country simply isn't economically feasible. How many Americans are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for their trash service?
By that argument, nobody better live in dense urban cities, because there, almost 100% of the waste has to be trucked long distances to find somewhere it can actually be buried.
Trash service -- whether paid directly (as in the suburbs) or rolled into taxes (as in the city) -- frequently isn't cheap. It's usually somewhere around $50/month, for basic, once-a-week pickup of a large rolling can that holds 2-3 'contractor'/32 gallon bags of trash.' Trash collection employees also make pretty decent money, for manual labor (as they should.)
>By that argument, nobody better live in dense urban cities, because there, almost 100% of the waste has to be trucked long distances to find somewhere it can actually be buried.
Sorry, no: trash from any American city is trucked a relatively short distance to a nearby landfill. It might be a county or two away (i.e., not exactly next door), but it certainly isn't half a continent away.
The US is huge and most of it is sparsely populated. There is no shortage of space. People from actual, tiny, crowded countries must find you guys hilarious.
There's no shortage of space very far from where people live, sure. Do you really think that shipping vast amounts of trash across the country can be done that cheaply?
Building new landfills in the eastern states will necessarily mean building them in someone's backyard. There's no place in the eastern states that is truly unpopulated.
Even New York is mostly empty. Have you ever been out of the city? I think the problem is you're assuming that the population must be zero. But it's quite possible to purchase a large tract of rural land with little agricultural value, nobody living nearby, and good ground water conditions and build a landfill there.
I think you're completely overestimating how much land is available in eastern states with "nobody living nearby". I've never seen any such land, at all. There's always someone living there. Go look up the population of any county in any east-coast state; it's not zero. You're also completely overestimating the amount of rural land with "little agricultural value" in the eastern states; any such land is usually a wetland, and protected for good reason.
The only places I've ever seen with "nobody living nearby" were in western states: Utah, Arizona, etc. It's not economical to ship trash from NY to AZ.
There's plenty of places where a landfill is only going to bother 20 households, and it would be easy to give them a million dollars to compensate if that was necessary.
"Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe. But no municipalities or governments wanted to acknowledge it because they spent decades training the population that recycling is important and they didn't want to undo those years of hard work.
It's only been in the last year that things are sort of coming back, but landfilling happens for almost all plastics and paper products, unless your muni does multi-bin sorting and not single-stream.
Now that petroleum is more expensive, maybe plastic recycling will make a resurgence, but I'm not holding my breath.
Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem, and hopefully someone clever can come up with 0-marginal effort waste bins that handle the sorting so Americans can remain lazy and provide a pre-sorted pickup for recyclers.
Multi-stream recycling at the source yields the lowest contamination and best recapture rates for material. [2]. The single-stream wave worked when china bought everything, but now that material quality matters, the volume benefits from single-stream are now a liability.
Huh, this is an interesting question I’ve never thought of: Why wouldn’t it always be more efficient to do single-stream recycling, with giant blue bins for people to throw recyclable stuff in, and have manual sorting at facilities?
If the answer is “too expensive to pay people to sort”, then maybe I’d argue that recycling is a terrible economic idea: isn’t it certainly more expensive in lost productivity for untrained people to puzzle over bin types, than for trained people to sort after that fact?
Single-stream recycling was basically a greenwashing scam enabled by the ability of supply chains to hide where the product ends up. The plastics weren't being recycled; they were being shipped to China, where peasant children would sift through them for anything of value and the rest would be left in the fields. I'd recommend the documentary "Plastic China" for an expose on that; it's the reason that the Chinese government has banned new garbage imports:
I highly suspect that recycling is in fact a terrible economic idea, and it's not at all cost effective to have people sort their garbage so it can be recovered for materials worth pennies anyway. The problem is that you cannot generally tell civilized affluent consumers that their consumption habits are going to turn this planet into the world of Wall-E, without them insisting we do something about this. The real product being sold was the myth of a sustainable future, just as it is with most other industries.
Contamination is an issue - another comment mentioned beer in the paper, and that's pretty accurate. You get paid based on the quality of material you can send to your downstream buyers, single stream stock has significantly more contamination from poorly cleaned containers on average than multi-stream.
But another part is just the sheer volume of material. There's no time to do manual sorting other than basic visual inspection to make sure things like bowling balls and concrete get to the sorters.
Optical sorters are incredibly cool, but only just now getting to a place where they can work fast enough and accurate enough to make a difference [3]. Separating the material apart gives the machines the best shot at sorting; less work they'll need to do. Even if humans only get 80% of the sorting right at collection, it's significantly better than no sorting at all, as it gives the machines time to pick and blow the material to proper channels for recovery and resale.
See [1] [2] for videos of NYC recycling plants to see the scale. Videos don't do it justice, and when you tour different plants, it puts the complexity of the problem into perspective.
When people throw paper, beer cans with some beer left over and other bottles together, the paper becomes soiled and useless. Glass breaks during loading/unloading of the truck and can't be separated out anymore. So the problem is that you have to separate initially.
Yes, glass must be separated else it breaks and contaminates everything. For glass to have value, it must be sorted by color (before transport so breakage is with like color).
Having worked on machines at landfills, I learned much recycling is a scam to make people feel good. Separated items in well-run scrap sites do get recycled, though that is the exception.
The landfill cells are not cheap to construct though it is straightforward.
In some States with tire reclamation fees to prevent disposal of whole tires, the fees pay for the dump to buy a shredder, stacker, and wheel loader to gradually sprinkle smaller tire pieces into the same place the whole tire would have gone.
After seeing many of these sites, I have concluded that burning most trash to make electricity would be appropriate.
The primary cost in the vast majority of products today is labor. Anything that takes less time and less people to make (eg. oil; cheap plastic goods; software; movies) gets cheap and immensely profitable. Anything that requires lots of labor (eg. Lamborghinis & other hand-crafted luxury goods; therapy; health care; college; homes) becomes super expensive. The cost of the actual materials is usually rounding error.
This holds as long as you pay people, but I doubt many folks would jump on slavery as a solution to our environmental woes.
get this: the cost of the raw materials themselves are also primarily in the labor it takes to locate, extract, and process them. it's labor all the way down.
Cleaning something to the point it can be reused safely (without knowing what the prior person did to it), or disassembling something damaged or broken to the point it can be melted down and recycled, is really hard and time consuming.
About the only things it makes sense to do this with are stuff made out of highly valuable metals, or are very large (aka big pieces), or where we don’t mind burning the non-recyclable stuff most of the time (aka crushed cars).
> "Operation National Sword" or "Green Sword"[1] from China in 2017 killed most recycling in North America and Europe
A large portion of "recycling" sent to China was actually landfilled or incinerarted in China. So it mostly "killed" us sending off our waste to somewhere else pretending we were recycling it. Single stream didn't actually "work" even when we sent it to China -- the Chinese government just thought the amount of money we paid them to landfill or incinerate plastic and other solid waste (after shipping it 7000 miles!) while pretending to recycle it was worth the environmental consequences to them, until they didn't.
> According to the report from two American advocacy groups, The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, American recycling statistics counted exported plastic waste as “recycled”, despite the reality that, once they left US shores, they were more likely to be burned or dumped than recycled. The US plastics recycling rate peaked at 9.5 per cent in 2014, and a large chunk of that was exported to China.…
> China imported 8.88 million tons of plastic waste before the ban, and a January 2021 study in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed journal, found that 70.6 per cent of this waste was either buried or mismanaged…
> “After China’s 2018 ban, countries found other destinations to send their waste to, which did not have as strict regulations as China. The same problems that caused China to stop importing plastic waste were then transferred to other countries,” she said.
> Recycling boils down to a really really really big and messy sorting problem
No, it boils down to companies actually putting in some goddamned effort to use actually fucking recyclable and recycled materials. Anything else is a goddamned side show.
Just fucking throw it away. Why do we pay extra for the privilege of recycling something that is barely recyclable to begin with?
Putting plastic in a landfill sequesters carbon, has less emissions in transportation, and doesn’t require paying people to sort it (ultimately born by us chumps paying extra to recycle it - if recycling were truly worth it, they’d be paying us to take it away, or at least discount our garbage service for separating out plastics). Landfills already have mitigations in place for groundwater contamination since landfills can have much more harmful things than micro plastics seep out of them.
Not to mention all the micro labor involved in cleaning plastic, and in sorting it for people who aren’t lucky enough to have single stream recycling. Maybe it makes some people feel good but it seems like a distraction and waste of time just to make an unviable activity slightly more viable (if plastic recycling were actually viable this would be centralized since it’s more efficient).
I completely support recycling for materials like aluminum and glass that make sense to recycle, but recycling plastic has never made sense economically, and putting it in a landfill isn’t that bad.
Oddly, my county (Fairfax Co, VA) stopped collecting glass, but continues to collect plastic. IIRC, the problem was broken glass clogging up the sorting machinery.
Anyways, I’d prefer we taxed the crap out of single-use packaging to properly account for the waste handling over time.
FWIW Fairfax now has purple bins scattered around for recycling glass, which then gets crushed up and used in place of fill gravel in county projects. It's a pain to drop it all off yourself but at least it is actually getting used. BTW I highly recommend wearing ear protection, it can be really loud dropping the glass into the container.
Taxing the crap out of anything to fix a problem means taking money from one group of people, losing 80% to gov bureaucracy, and giving the remaining 20% to someone else. Likely a campaign donor.
When will people recognize that government is really really bad at solving problems. How is that war on drugs going anyway?
How else would you regulate negative externalities? The goal is to build the externality into the price, which then gives incentive to move to less harmful packaging, etc. Spending any revenue on something useful is a secondary goal here.
The war on drugs is a completely different situation.
Prince William did the same with Glass. But also only takes 1 and 2 plastic now.
My understanding was that there isn't any facility that can economically handle the glass anywhere in the region. So it just wasn't affordable to do anything other than crush it.
Agreed. I feel like I live in crazy land, when there's so much focus on banning plastic straws and bags. Then, only to replace them with paper straws coated with (likely) some horrific chemical that still fall apart or 'reusable' shopping bags that take 50x the amount of plastic/energy to manufacture and then take extra energy to clean.
People could do far more to 'save the planet' by keeping their house at 65F in the Winter and 78F in the Summer, but that doesn't have the same virtuous feel as campaigning to ban 'evil' single-use plastics. Nobody will see you shiver/sweat in your house, so there's nothing to brag about.
Back in 1989 - Dow Chemcial made a proposal. Even then, there was too many plastic type to sort out and contamination was a major issue. They had a realistic but somewhat defeatist solution. Just burn it all. Use it for heat and power, treat plastic as an intermediate step of oil and nothing more. Then figure out emissions capture technology so that it can be stored somehow.
I don't agree with it entirely but I did like that it was an realistic approach to a complex problem.
Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills.
Recycling plastic is a non-solution to a much bigger problem: over-consumption of plastics.
The only way I see forward is for governments to implement policies that discourage use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers. Some places have done this with plastic bags, but need to do it for plastic single-use bottles, etc.
- They are often quite economically produced, and only require a small amount of plastic.
- They are likely reused, often as trash can liners.
- As long as we bury them in appropriate landfills, then the carbon in the bag goes back into the ground. (See other comments on the myth of landfill space running out.)
- Furthermore, cloth tote bags hold bacteria and are unhygienic for carrying groceries. Washing the bags cost electricity/water and probably not carbon neutral either.
The reusable bags have a serious UX problem too. I have to buy as many reusable bags as my largest grocery order ever. Next, I have to carry all those empty bags with me throughout the store. Then, I have to launder my bags to get the inevitable nasty grossness out of them.
I wish they had a propane tank model instead: I buy reusable bag credits. At the checkout, my items are bagged from a supply of clean reusable bags, and that number is deducted from my credits (if I need more, I can instantly buy them). When I return to the store, I bring my bags back to the bag return where the bags will be laundered in bulk in commercial machines.
They are likely reused, often as trash can liners.
Indeed, I don't know anyone who doesn't reuse the free plastic bags they get from stores, even if it's only a single reuse.
The other thing to note is that plastic bags are naturally waterproof. You can even wash (more like rinse) them if you so desire, but they also don't tend to attract dirt, unlike the woven types.
Some fair points. However, many (most?) reusable grocery bags these days are made from jute, or a mix of jute and cotton, not cotton. Jute is much more environmentally friendly than cotton, and it can be rough so minimally processed. We're not talking about those highly-processed fashion cotton bags (that don't really replace plastic bags).
Some cloth bags are made with plastic, which is still better than single-use plastic bags (esp since one of those larger tote bags, like the kind at Trader Joe's replaces 4-5 of those plastic bags that supermarkets would bag your groceries in.
It's also not about how much plastic is used to create the plastic bags, it's how much environmental pollution is created from the bags.
Organic cotton bags have some kind of footprint 20,000 times higher than a plastic bag.
For climate impact specifically, you have to reuse a cotton bag 52 times. And an organic cotton bag 149 times. The really big numbers are based on things like ozone impact and fertilizer runoff, which are worth considering but should be taken in comparison with daily life and not just plastic bags.
It's really about the pinnacle of uninformed virtue signaling that does more harm than good. But it's okay because you got to say you were wonderful for being willing to sacrifice so much, and call anybody who disagreed or tried to have a rational discussion about the actual numbers an anti-The Science™ bootlicker for big plastic bag.
> Just to be clear, it wasn't being recycled when we were shipping it to China either. It was just going into their landfills instead of our landfills.
Source? My impression was that china was buying the recycling from us[1]. Sure, some of that was not recycleable and ended up getting burned/landfilled/dumped in a river, but they weren't intending on just landfilling it.
Recycling plastic is a greenwashing con that is designed to deflect from citizens demanding a reduction in the use of plastics.
At this point, there is pretty much only one material that is actually recycled, because it is easy and profitable to do so: aluminum. We should eb enouraging manufacturers to adopt either aluminum or cardboard for all their packaging (the latter is not recyclable in practice, but at least is sequesters carbon). By encourage, I mean ban plastic packaging outright or impose draconian taxes on it.
Steel as well. The big integrated U.S. steelmakers like U.S. Steel went bankrupt because most steel today is no longer produced from iron ore. Rather, something like 80% of the steel produced today is made by melting down scrap steel in electric arc furnaces, which is a completely different technology & supply chain stack.
Not everyone will care about environmental affects so it's important to mention the health crisis.
Plastics, and associated chemicals like pthlates and PFOAs, that are also terrible for our health; reproductive health in particular. Scientists like Shanna Swan are blaming plastics for declining sperm counts and boys having less masculine features than in older generations. It goes way beyond BPA as the replacement chemicals for "BPA free" products are innocent until proven to be unsafe. Even tea bags are fully of plastic.
It's a minefield trying to avoid it. I'd really like plastics to be banned at least for single use packaging initially.
Placing blame and responsibility on consumers to not purchase single-use plastic is not the right approach. Discouraging the use of single-use plastics should be done at government policy level to heavily tax the sale of single-use plastics, and subsidize sustainable alternatives.
I think you can go farther than this that it's in the interests of industry to deflect blame to individual citizens because it distracts from the fact that big problems need to be solved at choke-points, and manufacturing is one of the biggest ones we have.
I agree that this isn't the consumer's problem, but I don't agree government policy or taxes incentivize anything but fraud. Do we really need even more government contractors?
Taxes are basically a shortcut to adjusting market forces to result in a more desirable behavior. Fraud is possible only if the incentive is poorly aligned with the result, allowing people to take advantage of an alternate, but easier, action to benefit from the program. Lawmakers who give in to the demands of special interests will inevitably create these loopholes, it does not happen in a vacuum.
Product manufacturers should have to bear the cost of disposing the products/packaging they ship. It would be great if every product came stamped with some manufacturer ID code or something, and when you throw it away, the waste management company eventually scans it all and each manufacturer got billed based on material/weight/etc.
Manufacturers would just transfers to the consumer. We have a CRV tax for each bottle/can here in California, and as far as I can tell, it has no affect on consumer behavior.
>Manufacturers would just transfers to the consumer
As opposed to not transferring the cost when they're forced to use glass bottles or whatever? Plastic is used because it's cheap. Switching to alternatives would undoubtedly cost more money.
>We have a CRV tax for each bottle/can here in California, and as far as I can tell, it has no affect on consumer behavior.
Maybe this says something about the effectiveness of plastic bottles? If consumers/companies are still choosing plastic bottles even though they have to pay the disposal costs, maybe this means that plastic bottles are better as a whole and we shouldn't be trying to force a switch to alternatives?
CRV doesn't work as well because it's not on the (literal) sticker price, so it gets appended after the consumer has already made a buying decision in most cases.
Prices may increase but imagine how much more competitive American or European manufacturing could be if the cheapest materials (and incidentally most environmentally harmful) were taxed appropriately.
There’s a cycle of waste where cheap goods break but its okay because its cheap. Instead we could be making things that last.
There’s plenty of manufacturing devoted to quality, but often are outcompeted by outsourced manufacturing using questionable labor and lacking environmental safeguards.
I believe they’re referring to the KitchenAid stand mixer, a piece of equipment that’s known for being stoutly built. [1] (I know several people who’ve had theirs for decades.)
Sadly, anything other appliance branded KitchenAid is basically hit-or-miss. They license their name to other manufacturers for certain products, so you can’t count on the name on its own to guarantee quality.
Cars are more durable than ever, electronics often become obsolete before their life ends, and many building material would last a lifetime but become out of fashion so are thrown away.
I think that's just reusing, not recycling. To this day I still buy milk in a glass bottle that comes with a bottle deposit I need to pay. After I'm done with the milk I bring it back to the store to get my deposit back, while they ship the empty glass bottle back. They wash it and then fill it with new milk. It's easy to tell because the bottle only contains a printed logo, all the information that can change such as expiration date or the type of milk are not printed on the bottle at all.
That's different from aluminum can recycling or paper recycling. Those are made into raw aluminum billets or pulp to be manufactured again.
I have an old-fashioned milk delivery service near me that still uses glass bottles. They charge $2 deposit per bottle regardless of size. Works pretty well.
You're giving the plastics industry too much credit. The useful idiots who uncritically bought every word and helped them ram it down everyone's throats deserve some blame too.
And then you name one material that is recycled and ignore the rest, most of which are highly effective. It's called cherry-picking and it's a bad look.
Tangential meta-commentary on a phrase I'm seeing more often that I don't think is effective; "it's a bad look" is not a criticism, unless you can explain why a position being perceived poorly implies that it without merit in this particular circumstance. Most of the time, it is not an opinion worth sharing. For instance, this comment would have been a more effective argument if it simply stated that materials other than plastic could be recycled well. The addition of "it's a bad look" only adds snark which distracts from the point being made and makes the discussion needlessly contentious.
good catch, it's one of the more infuriating modern thought-terminating cliches. as if all that matters is how things look, rather than how they actually are.
I understood what you've said, and I've criticized it. "I don't like you" is also a common phrase, easily understood by most, and appropriate in some circumstances; but similarly, these circumstances are unlikely to come up when speaking to strangers in an online forum, so it's generally just a rude and unnecessary thing to say, and takes the discussion in a toxic direction.
Criticize people's ideas and leave them out of it. It's a basic courtesy that keeps the community healthy.
Basically recycling companies pay to export the waste to poor countries who simply dump or burn it instead of recycling it.
For this reason I avoid plastic and stick to cardboard, glass and aluminium. Fortunately plastic is extremely unfashionable in the UK right now and products are increasingly switching to card or aluminium instead.
Frontline did a documentary about this a while back. Your plastic fruit container may have "3" on it with the recycle symbol, which means it can go to a facility that can recycle that grade of plastic, but that doesn't mean your city / state has a facility that can process that, or will spend the money to build such a facility.
It was a move from the plastics industry to push a feel-good policy, but is likely not doing as much good as many of us think.
Voters wanted a feel good policy too, so it worked for politicians and basically everyone. Even today, no one is going to get elected by telling constituents they need to consume less and lower their quality of life.
It's very simple: If you have to pay to recycle things, it's a failure. If they pay you, it works.
China used to buy plastic recycling from the US (it was never just shipped for disposal, China actually paid for it). For a while they actually wanted it because they could use it to make new stuff. But it become uneconomical (too labor intensive), and they stopped.
Metal: You have people hunting for metal, and going through bins for it. i.e. it's good to recycle.
Cardboard: Same thing.
Everything else? Don't recycle it. Burn the plastic for energy, and bury everything else. Sweden actually buys garbage from other countries to burn for energy. Since they are paying for the item, this works just fine.
Western landfills are amazing technology that affordably and safely lock away garbage. Most of the land can be reclaimed for parks or golf courses or other public spaces.
Recycling programs often end in plastics being sent to Asian landfills which are little more than open dumps susceptible to rain, flooding, and contributing to the Pacific garbage patch.
Also interested if there is any recent work on micro reclamation of discarded high value materials. Probably drinking too much sci Fi cool aid but seems like landfills may someday be a treasure for mining once the tech is capable
The most valuable stuff in a landfill is probably aluminum, and based on some 2018 US numbers [1] estimated 1.8% of the mass of the landfill. Would need to dig through ~55.5 tonnes in an ideal scenario to get a tonne. Assuming you can sort it on site you still need to transport it to a facility. Process it and melt it back down into a usable form before selling it. Oh and there are various alloys that you probably have to figure out sorting between as well. At around $2200 / tonne right now. I just don't see the economics working out.
Perhaps in an older landfill it could be denser, and maybe it could be easier to sort after other materials have started to break down. Still doubt it would be very economical yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes economical someday.
I do wonder if it may be possible to sort more of the aluminum out on its way in to the landfill rather than trying to do it after the fact. It was something like $6B worth of aluminum landfilled based on the 2018 numbers.
I was also curious about separating efficiently and went down a rabbit hole on Eddy Current Separators. High speed rotating alternating magnets I guess can influence non-ferrous materials like aluminum. [2]
This is so disheartening. I subscribed to and helped perpetuate The Lie. Damn.
While we're on this topic, does anyone have info regarding what happens to the plastic bags I return to my local (CA, US) grocery store collection bin? Are they part of a separate stream?
I add all sorts of used plastic bags to that bin (thin produce bags, the more heavy-duty grocery bags, Amazon padded shipping envelopes, deflated shipping air bags, clean zip lock bags, etc.). I also wonder if I'm gumming up the works by putting different types of plastic bags in the bin because most bags don't have recycle markings/numbers.
Yes, thin plastic bags are very bad for typical processing machines. They take them at grocery stores so they can be a different stream. Although I have my doubts that much recycling is actually done with them there too.
Putting things in recycling that aren't explicitly accepted by your local facility is bad. Never put things in that aren't marked, and definitely not thin unmarked stuff. It increase the costs by gumming up processing equipment if they try to do something with it. And likely does just shunt the whole section over to the landfill. Although most of the stuff probably ends up there anyways. Same thing with greasy pizza boxes, they just taint the load.
Sadly, almost certainly. The results of your action is that the entire load is rejected as mixed waste and sent to landfill rather than being able to be recycled so although your intentions are good, the end result is far worse than if you didn't do it all.
I used to think that failing to recycle plastic was fine, because plastic in landfills is carbon sequestered. If not made into plastic, that same carbon would be burned and enter the atmosphere.
Then I found out that, for each carbon bound up in a piece of plastic, a half-dozen are released to the atmosphere in doing that. Thus, for each bit of plastic not recycled, so much more is made from scratch, and that much more CO2 enters the atmosphere. (Presumably, recycling involves energetic processing, but less.) In the future, when the energy used in processing comes more from renewables, will balances shift?
Shale oil, by the way, is equally evil. For each carbon extracted and delivered, four or five are burnt in extracting it.
The Chinese used practically slave labour to sift through US garbage before they ended the imports. 'Recycling' was a euphemism for offshoring garbage whether plastic bottles or solar panels, but now the Chinese have tightened their standards.
The article is specifically about plastic waste. A considerably higher proportion of glass, metal, and paper is successfully recycled, not all of it, but value is extracted and reused.
Throw your plastics directly in the trash. This way you will be honest with yourself about where your plastic is going and maybe use marginally less.
The truth is though that if you aren't growing your own food and making your own household items, you are pretty much signed up to create large volumes of plastic waste in a way that is mostly out of your control.
I always suspected this, because given what I know of the average American, there's no chance that the recycling bins aren't full of all kinds of nonrecyclable items. The only things that I expect are reliably recycled are those which are profitable enough to pick out of the mess.
I was working at a fast food restaurant, emptying the trash cans several times a day, when my city decided to mandate separate recycle and compost bins in dining areas. It tripled the number of cans I had to empty and clean out, but they all ended up in the same garbage dumpster. Some of my coworkers didn't give a fuck but I couldn't in good conscience dump a bin full of half-empty milkshakes and chewing gum into the recycling dumpster, or a bunch of foil wrappers and plastic bottles into the compost.
Dude, it is disgusting what people put in recycling. I think people may be trying to sabotage it the stuff they put in there. Lots of used kitty litter. Lots of soiled clothes. Worst thing we had come through was a human body.
Nothing much interesting. They shut down the plant and called the cops. Some of the people in pre-sort (where things first enter the line) were kind of shook up by it.
We'd get guns come through a couple of times a month. Those were supposed to get called in to the police too, but since the job is only worked by felons that didn't happen (no snitching rule in effect).
> In large part, that's due to the fact that China stopped importing plastic waste back in 2018, causing a massive pile up in western countries.
I don't think so, I've seen reports that most plastic waste sent to China wound up in landfills or incinerators too. So it's actually probably a net improvement to not spend all that energy sending it 7000 miles to China to put it in a landfill.
It's been a fiction all along, we just paid China to make it easier for us to pull the wool over our own eyes. Or, even more cycnically, to get it into their landfills or incinerated air pollution instead of ours.
It's not shocking if you understand some of what's involved.
For glass, there are lots of different chemical compositions related to color, hardness and other physical and chemical properties, plus all the contamination with other materials like labels. You can't just throw it all into a big furnace and get anything except low quality glass with inclusions - and there's no market for that. Heck, ask glass blowers what COE they use and if you can bring your own colors in.
Paper has a lot of the same issue, cleaning it isn't worth what you can get from it. I would guess that we might see an increase in some sort of biological breakdown of it in the future, BUT that might end up releasing a lot more carbon than simply sequestering it in landfills.
I suspect that we'll see big improvement in plastics in the coming decades with better breakdown and separation options, but even there contamination will be a big problem.
Metals are about the only thing really practical to recycle, at least given current prices for them.
Here's a 12 minute walk through a glass recycling facility and a nearby facility that turns the cullet into blow-in fiberglass insulation. Quite interesting. There's an optical sorter that excludes brown glass and ceramic pieces.
Nice and informative video! My exposure to glass has mostly been working with someone doing glass blowing and hot glass work, so even the clean cullet from the recycling process would likely not be good enough there - it needs basically zero contaminants, because just one or two little dark spots in the clear part of a paperweight can be a problem.
We've recently had another bin added for compost. Now it's Recycle, Compost, Garbage.
This upset me so much as it is very clear that there is no mature recycling industry and it's getting worse.
A mature recycling industry could just take "rubbish" as a single output, sort it efficiently and get on with things. Get money for taking your rubbish. Get money for selling recycled output.
Everyone has experienced the "outsource it to the masses so we don't have to cover the expense of doing it".
What happened to "efficiency of expertise" and "economies of scale" ?
Moat of plastic recycling is focused on heating up and melting down thermoplastics. I've been wondering if there is another way. Like dissolving the plastics into solvents, then distilling and separating the different compounds in the solution, then pull out thr solvents in a recoverable way, then one would be left with pure compounds. It seems like the science and tech for this exists now, we just need to industrialized it and make it profitable to do so. Not unlike distilling organic compounds like we do today on a commercial scale.
I wonder how long it will be until landfills become valuable mines. A lot of materials in them may certainly be reused again in the future. After all, everything is "recycling" on a long-enough timescale... and the fact that the stuff in landfills has already been processed once may be advantageous from the perspective of needing less processing when it's mined again, compared to something like crude oil.
Perhaps we should require all manufacturers of physical products to have cradle-to-grave lifecycle planning for their products. The supermarket should accept discarded containers from consumers, the tomato soup company should accept discarded cans from supermarkets and the can manufacturers should accept discarded cans from them. Pretty soon you will have reusable containers for almost everything.
A 100% win would be not producing the plastics in the first place in order to not have this problem, and then producing heat via a renewable source.
Everything below that is less of a 100% win.
> Burning plastic does not release pollutants
That is strictly false. It depends on the plastic. "Dioxins are just one of the many harmful emissions from incinerators. They are highly toxic and can cause cancer and damage to the immune system"
From what I've researched, there dioxins, PFAS, heavy metals, and particulate matter result from burning plastic. I haven't seen anything that would suggest that only water and CO2 are the only byproducts of burning plastic.
Who's adding CO2? You substitute CO2 from oil, with CO2 from plastic. This actually reduces the total amount of CO2, because you don't need to pump extra oil out of the ground, which costs extra energy.
> What exactly is a pollutant by your estimation?
Something that doesn't belong there in any amount. If there's simply too much of it, but some amount is ok, that might be a problem, but that's not a pollutant. Otherwise a flood from a hurricane would be called "Water pollution", which I hope you can see is a pretty silly definition.
> Something that doesn't belong there in any amount.
I have never heard this definition before! How do you in particular decide which compounds shouldn’t be in the atmosphere in any amount?
It kind of seems like such a narrow definition of “pollutant” enables the justification of burning darn near anything short of man-made nuclear isotopes that don’t otherwise exist in nature. How does this definition serve a practical purpose?
edit:
To address your hurricane analogy, I am not a fan of hurricanes or their damage. I have had friends die in hurricanes.
I agree that trying to argue an arbitrary definition of “pollution” to serve one’s pre-existing ideas or pedantic need to be Dictionary Emperor is silly and likely pointless at best, though.
From dictionary.com:
any substance, as certain chemicals or waste products, that renders the air, soil, water, or other natural resource harmful or unsuitable for a specific purpose.
Can you link me to where you’ve found that “pollutant” is defined as a nearly infinite group of compounds but explicitly excludes CO2? This is the first time I’ve heard this.
Where in the world are you getting this "nearly infinite" business? I never said anything like that, in fact I gave you a short list. Go back and read what I wrote, I feel like you skimmed it or something.
And your dictionary definition is problematic because it doesn't define "unsuitable for a specific purpose". It's basically a circular definition. I will then ask you please define "unsuitable for a specific purpose" and we are back where we started.
You said that only nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and “some noble gases” should be in the atmosphere. Everything else (such as salt) is a pollutant.
How many compounds are there that are not nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 and “some noble gases”? In my estimation that is uncountable but maybe you have some hard numbers?
edit:
“Suitable purpose“ for me would be creating or maintaining an environment that sustains human life.
Is your “checkmate” position something like “Hah! In my dictionary, ‘suitable purpose’ only relates to underwater welding, root beer production, and synthetic diamond formation!”
I personally find moving goalposts to avoid talking about concrete things in concrete terms to be problematic, but I understand that if a person is quite jaded about the future of life on earth that it might seem that the only thing worth debating is semantics. Maybe avoiding boredom matters more than attempting to avert catastrophe.
And? There are uncountable pollutants - why is that an issue? None of those other things belong in the air, in any amount.
> would be creating or maintaining an environment that sustains human life.
So my small campfire where I burn plastic is perfectly fine then? After all the toxins released are minor and rapidly dissipate, so the environment still sustains human life. Your definition doesn't even acknowledge that you can sustain life, but everyone has asthma because of all the particulate matter in the air.
By your definition there are no pollutants. Or at best you can only talk about them in bulk once they reach levels sufficient to kill, but never about individual releases.
By my definition each individual release of something that doesn't belong in the air is pollution. I find my definition much more usable and useful.
> By my definition each individual release of something that doesn't belong in the air is pollution.
Does your classification of CO2 have a real upper limit of ppm wherein it becomes considered a pollutant? Or is it just “all plastic supply burned + 1”
Can you provide a link to where you got your definition of atmospheric pollution? I have tried Google and DDG and I haven’t found anyone claiming that “pollution is everything but this small handful of gases” in anything scientific. I keep finding it as being relative to outcomes and not a function of what is or isn’t in an Excel column.
Sure: "A pollutant or novel entity is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource." From Wikipedia.
A "novel entity" i.e. anything that doesn't belong in the air. Wikipedia adds that it must in some way harm things to be a pollutant, which is a reasonable addition.
I am glad that we agree that “pollutant” is relative to outcomes. I appreciate you amending your previous statement that “pollutant” is just a word referring to anything but the high school textbook reference list of expected atmospheric gases. It is an indeed silly view that no dictionary, encyclopedia or academic paper states. It’s so silly that to hold such a position consistently would essentially mean that “daytime” is meaningfully “a period marked by light pollution” since the normal state of the universe is darkness. Imagine having such a useless and meaningless definition of “pollution”!
I have a couple more questions!
If you hosted an indoor buffet and you needed to keep the chafing dishes warm, would you opt to burn ethanol or (if it were cheaper) the shredded remains of takeout containers?
and
Why does burning plastic have black smoke and ethanol not?
You personally don't have a qualified dumping site or a trash-fueled generator with exhaust scrubbers, so you should send your garbage off to collection.
> This is the first I’ve heard of exhaust scrubbers! I thought we were talking about the literal impact of burning plastic?
We were never talking about just burning plastic. We were talking about burning plastic inside a heat/power plant.
And power plants, especially trash-fueled ones, have exhaust scrubbers. I only mentioned it now for emphasis, not because I was changing anything.
The first comment you replied to specified "industrial incinerator" for a reason.
> How does burning plastic impact things for people that don’t own exhaust scrubbers?
I don't care how it affects those people, because they're burning it outside a power plant, and they're not part of this conversation. If they burn it it's worse than if they bury it, but they shouldn't be doing either one. They should be handing the trash over to people that are equipped to handle it properly.
Those cannot replace all oil and natural gas burning, so you may as well get rid of the plastic first before burning those fossil fuels. If you think about it, it's still recycling, because you are reusing the waste plastic for energy.
There's very very little nitrogen in plastic. Among commonly used plastics just nylon has it (and not very much - 2 out of 38 atoms are nitrogen), and there's not a large amount of nylon in trash.
There's probably some contamination, but ideally it's just plastic and paper. And yah, scrubbers would handle everything else. Vinyl has chlorine which also needs to be removed.
These types of scrubbers are in use all over, it's not a new technology.
The main thing is to remove food and other organic waste, remove metals because they are useful. Glass is harmless, but also clutters up the ash, so best to remove it as well.
If it were up to me recycling would work like this:
Metal, plastic, and paper would be recycled, single stream. The metal is easily removed, the rest is burned.
Glass and organics (and everything else) would be thrown out, with some people opting to compost, I would encourage, but not require, composting. There is really no reason to recycle glass, and trying to do so causes more harm than good since it smashes and the shards get in everything and just makes it harder to make a pure product.
If you absolutely must recycle glass, it has to be in its own bin, do not single stream it.
In terms of CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas (and much much worse than any zero carbon source). Energy is fungible, there's no reason to encourage producing CO2 when it's possible not to.
> CO2 per unit energy burning plastic is much worse than burning natural gas
That is simply not true. Polyethylene (the most common plastic) is C2H4, while natural gas is a mix ranging from CH4 to C3H8. i.e. almost identical in terms of CO2.
Plastic is actually better in some ways since you don't need to spend energy a second time to extract even more oil from the ground, you can just burn what you already have.
Plus the world does not burn exclusively natural gas, not even close.
> when it's possible not to.
As should be pretty obvious the idea is you don't burn some other oil, and instead burn plastic. When we are 100% off of oil/coal/etc we can stop burning plastic, but right now, today, burning plastic is the best option.
Burning plastic is not going to magically cause extra CO2 emissions, it would simply substitute one for another, with total amount unchanged.
Yes, correct. My method was just a shortcut which yields basically the same number because it all atoms of hydrogen, carbon, etc that are burned release the same amount of energy (but you do need to account for the binding energy of the molecule, which my method does not do).
I used it because I didn't immediately find data on the enthalpy of burning plastic in combination with CO2 released.
Plastic is also a hydrocarbon, so the binding energy will be quite similar to natural gas, so my method is sufficiently accurate.
When we get off of fossil fuels, the economy will have a shortage of cheap reduced carbon. At that point, plastic can be recycled not as plastic, but as a carbon source. It'll be vigorously thermally processed to get small molecules out that can be dealt with like fossil fuels currently are.
Fun fact. The recycling plant I worked at would buy and mix in new cardboard with our recycled cardboard because we couldn't get the contamination rate to an acceptable level without blending.
Lots of talk about blaming recycling programs. But the OP as I understand it, shows that people are not even bothering to put but 5% of their plastic in the recycle bin to begin with!
Also, most of the ocean plastic comes from a small number of rivers in the less developed world. [1] Rich countries aren't really the problem.
While we should try to reduce waste as much as possible. This is far more effective at the front end of the process when they're designed and produced, the vast amount of carbon is from direct carbon from production and follow on carbon from the carbon intensity of the products under use.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...