In what is about to become the year 2023, the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether. Some day go through your Amazon purchase history for the last decade and see how much absolute garbage purchases you made.
Resist buying stuff you don't really need.
Can you repurpose an item?
Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back.
We live in a community of ~100 people. We have a room full of other people's left over things that we can take (or add to) for free. 90% of the gifts and clothes for our, and other people's children, we source from that room. We are able to give away a lot more and higher quality stuff than if we would have to buy it and the kids are just as happy.
It's incredible how much stuff is produced just to be thrown away. But I guess it keeps the wheels turning? I often wonder wether this is the best system there is. Something tells me it's not.
To take away from this, I've found that people who search for free stuff on Facebook tend to be painful to deal with - not turning up, leaving parts of the product they don't want behind for you to dispose of, jumping on products they don't even want just because it's free and just generally being ungrateful arseholes.
You're much better off selling something at a price below market value if you want it gone cheap to someone can use it.
At the end of my posting I ask people to write me back with an exact date and time they will come over, a number so I can text them the address, and one of their personal or professional goals. If they don't write all 3 then I don't respond. It works pretty well!
I've had good luck requiring someone to make an appointment and pick up free stuff. No need to deal with money, they still get the stuff for free and seems to cut out the time wasters.
I’ve used BuyNothing many times in my city. I’ve mostly used it to give things away, but have scored some great camping gear too. It’s been a very positive experience compared to listing free items on Facebook or Craigslist. People on BuyNothing have been responsible and grateful.
The community was created in the 70s. Back then it was more political, today it's more practical. The age demographic is more or less flat (0-85) with a dip around late teens (we're in the countryside to most young adults choose to move to the city). We own the property together and cook and eat together five days a week. We have various shared workshops, depending on what the need/desires are at any given time. While we don't farm the land ourselves (not enough land), we try to buy local and organic produce whenever possible.
Cooking for many people, sharing tools, common areas, etc, saves a lot of money and resources. We are thus able to support a wide range of income levels. With the caveat that we're in a fairly equal country (Northern Europe), the community attracts a wide range of backgrounds, from unskilled workers to teachers and doctors. Everyone gets chores and responsibilities assigned based on personal priorities, skills and the needs at the time.
We have a "rule-book" that defines a democratic voting system for making decisions. We hold meetings every other week. I would lie if I said it was always pleasant or easy, but it does work surprisingly well. I think it helps that the place is around 50 years old, so we've had the chance to learn from mistakes and update the "rule-book" along the way.
I don't think it's for everyone, and I'm not sure how well this scales beyond 50-100 people, but I do think that you can be happier, healthier and wealthier living in suitable small-scale communities, sharing everyday tasks and tools. Instead of everyone owning their own everything.
Yeah it sounds interesting but what are the details on how likely obstacles are overcome? what do you do when the room fills up? Who owns the land? Who manages it? Who stops people from using it as a trash repository?
> the most effective way of recycling is to limit your purchases altogether.
This has always been true. There's just been a lot of "feel good" marketing around this point to beguile the market out of this rather common sense in the past few decades.
> Then turn to the recycling industry and maybe it will find a way back.
Putting my curmudgeon hat on for a second, I remember a time when we used to make products with high enough quality and durability that they would either last nearly a lifetime or get repaired when they didn't.
> Putting my curmudgeon hat on for a second, I remember a time when we used to make products with high enough quality and durability that they would either last nearly a lifetime or get repaired when they didn't.
I don't intend this as a slight, but as an honest question: do you feel like you correctly compensate for survivorship bias when looking back at how products were made?
I ask because, in my experience doing repairs as a hobby, it's just the nicer things that have survived. People don't remember the cheap record players they got as kids, the cheap tools, &c.; they remember the things that are still with them, which are the higher-quality ones.
Edit: In particular, it's pretty hard to repair a lot of consumer goods from the 1930s-1970s: they tend to use plastics that crack very easily and that aren't mendable, or are outright hazardous to repair (like bakelite, which sometimes has asbestos mixed into it).
My experience is that goods from before mass manufacturing are objectively higher-quality and more repairable. That's before cheap consumer goods of 1970, though.
There are at least two issues at play:
1) If I build something, I can do it again. I won't use ultra-thin metal which is likely to be damaged being welded, injection molding, or similar sorts of processes which require a factory.
2) I'll do a bit of overengineering. Modern consumer goods use the absolute minimum in materials possible. If you take things apart, it's pretty magical.
I'll also take care of it (and know how). If something costs me a week's salary, I'll buy fewer things, and I won't want them to break. If a gizmo costs a few minutes' salary, I'm better off replacing it. Maintenance is a nice hobby for some of us, but far from economically rational.
How would one snap out of being seduced by feel-good marketing?
For the last six months or so, I've been aware that I want to buy an iPhone even though I have a smartphone that fulfills all my needs. The cost for the value proposition of the iPhone is inferior to many smartphones, and for me, it has zero marginal value. I don't care about the iPhone's prestige or "lifestyle" angle. There is no justification for buying it. Still, it appeals to me, and I don't know why. This could be a problem if I did not have the rational faculties of an adult. And now and then, I read about a kid saving up for an iPhone and being very disappointed/regretting the purchase.
It's seriously hazardous that we no longer have a way to opt out of this influence of advertising. I wish we did (on reasonable terms, without completely withdrawing from society). For a while in the 2010s, minimalism and anti-consumerism became more popular. But looking back, they seem to have been more of a fad. Now if a kid doesn't have an iPhone in school, it's "cringe".
Ad blocking helps a lot. I have almost zero exposure to marketing. I do not follow anyone either, so I'm not exposed to their consumption habits.
It helps.
The other part is to ground your identity in a different set of values. There are many circles in which frivolous purchases are a sin. There are many people who find virtue in economy and restraint.
I wouldn't blame yourself. Humans are curious and seek out new things. Humans like things of "beauty" and Apple does an unbelievable job of marketing & product design.
I don't think humans are that logical. Feel-good marketing aims to associate buying, owning, or doing something with a pleasant emotion. Whether any pleasant feelings, added value or utility are achieved by actually buying, owning or doing something is beyond the scope of this marketing. And it often is just a false promise.
I'd bet many of the older things were also disposable but the ones that lasted stick in the mind more. But absolutely we also moved towards less and less repairability in how things are assembled. Adhesives or plastic welding vs rivets and screws. I'm afraid I am not good at thinking about the question well, but is it better to have lighter cars that need less metal but in exchange they are less repairable? I get tied up in defining the bounds of the question so I never have a satisfactory answer.
A lot of the money in tech seems to be tied to the same marketing, convincing people to consume. The greenwashing is a problem as well, although I wish I weren't so cynical when I see a company trying to do better so often it seems to read as "We're making our X more green and efficient, so buy more of them"
I was swimming in a lake this summer with a friend involved in marketing when he made a comment about what happens when they run out of people's attention seconds. Do we make more, fight harder to retain attention, die?, or is there another solution.
It is more than just marketing, the economy depends on people spending more than they make. The entire fiat currency system requires it is be fueled by debt spending and consumerism
Putting my curmudgeon hat on for a minute, no you don't. You imagine a time when things lasted, largely because you were able to ignore all of the byproducts and externalities that went along with them.
My favorite in this vein is furniture. Yes, if you use hardwood that is not legal for very valid reasons, it can possibly last longer. Or if you get a worker to use toxic paints and other hazardous repair techniques, it is amazing what you can restore.
Meanwhile, the true irony is that a household going through several modern appliances probably still uses less electricity and other raw materials than the older ones that supposedly lasted longer. All while not poisoning the users.
Don't get me wrong, early adopters still typically get bad products. But one need only look at modern lighting to see an example of how the old way was borderline garbage. Yes, the first led bulbs were bad. Same with early low flow toilets and high efficiency washers. Modern ones, though, are so much better than the older ones that it is hard to believe.
If you want to focus on the infrastructure, the amplifiers needed for old communication were ridiculously expensive and actually somewhat justified long distance fees. The repeaters of modern tech are far superior.
It’s small in the grand scheme of things. But when I want something from Amazon that I don’t need immediately I leave it in my cart. I’ll build up my cart for a few days/weeks so that more of the items shop together.
I've always understood "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to be applied in that order. But commercial consumption propaganda of course emphasizes recycling and de-emphasizes reduction and reuse. Emphasizing recycling encourages guilt-free consumption which is good for profit.
I've always liked the idea of "Libraries of Things". You join it like a normal library and can borrow things that you don't use often, so you don't even need to buy them in the first place. Here's an example in the UK: https://sharefrome.org/things/
I loved this. There are multiple incarnations of the concept.
Then in my city came the startups, the tech bros and sisters without tech background but marketing-fu and now you have to pay a monthly fee to lend and rent screwdrivers.
Back to getting on a first-name basis with my neighbours then.
If anyone is struggling with this, don't save your payment details in Amazon. It'll make you question if what you're ordering is worth it when it's not a one click thing. Another good thing is leaving it in your cart over night.
I've found that usually, when I get the urge to buy something, if I just wait a few days the desire will subside and I can go on with my life and not miss it. Amazon does its best to enable impulse purchases for that very reason.
Can you tell a bit more about the motivation behind itemizing things and how litemize help ?
Passwords like haQ#YuaDC3&j!mm^ are rejected.
BTW: I like the idea behind https://synced.to/, I have entertained the idea of geotagged digital/virtual tag/graffiti for a while without doing anything about it.
Thanks for checking it out, and the helpful feedback. I'll fix it.
There's a few motivations.
One was me noticing how I'd somehow just accumulated stuff over time, and I've seen the longer term result of that with my parents. So I wanted to be on top of what I'm getting and why, how long I'm using it for and also how I'm disposing of it.
A second motivation is to use others' lists to make more considered decisions.
And thirdly I'm curious to figure out what might be the minimal set of things one needs to live comfortably.
And cheers, I'm working on an update to Synced which I think will be quite cool! (coming in the next couple of months).
Slightly tangential, but for the past few weeks I've been actively eating less by deciding what I want to eat, and then ordering / making a slightly smaller portion.
I imagine you could apply the same thinking to shopping. Before checking out, pick one or two items to cancel or leave to the next purchase, or choose a smaller size.
Sometimes it costs a little more per unit, but the upside is you consume less.
Ha! I'm always reminding people that the original order was "Reduce > Reuse > Recycle" but it seems as if many people just never learned that or quickly forgot. They jump right to "recycle" as if it's the obvious environmental choice.
But I like your version better and will start using it. Seriously, don't get sucked in to getting your brain Dopamine hits from buying stuff. You'll save money and the environment.
One of the best features on Amazon is the buy later button.
You found it, it's awesome.
Add it to the shopping cart.
Move it to Buy Later.
Forget about it.
> Some day go through your Amazon purchase history for the last decade and see how much absolute garbage purchases you made.
Uuuh, none? I've gone through 2 years and it was literally either a consumable (dog treats) or some kind of hardware tool that I still have and will last me a lifetime.
Yeah, there is very little garbage in my purchase history. Anecdotally it seems like a minority of the people do the bulk of all garbage purchases. I have one friend for example with ADHD who does a ton of impulsive shopping.
I have no idea how many things you buy, the average, or what is the general opinion about it. Everyone buys a lot of stuff, I guess? Everyone saying that everyone buys a lot of stuff?
Nevertheless GGP accusing me (and some similar comments) is annoying, probably it annoys GP too for the same reason.
Is accusing the general reader that useful? Is it even true?
She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic.
PE burns much cleaner than coal, and probably paper too.
Burning plastic releases a slew of toxins into the air, including dioxins, furans, mercury and other emissions that threaten the health of people, animals and vegetation, according to multiple studies.
Unless they're somehow burning lots of chlorinated/fluorinated stuff (which is almost certainly not being used for much in the way of packaging, simply because those plastics are so much more expensive), that's just fearmongering. ...and mercury? WTF. That's where I stopped reading the article because it stopped making sense. Combustion certainly can't transmute elements, and mercury wouldn't be present unless they're burning something else...
...like coal, which does contain mercury as a significant impurity.
Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere. Further, burning of Poly Vinyl Chloride liberates hazardous halogens and pollutes air, the impact of which is climate change. The toxic substances thus released are posing a threat to vegetation, human and animal health and environment as a whole.
So if the study is on municipal solid waste overall, being burned in a pit, it's probably not very relevant to burning plastics by themselves. Municipal waste contains all sorts of things you wouldn't want to burn, like phones, batteries, fluorescent light bulbs etc.
Thank you both for this note. It helps me remember to practice skepticism in all things.
I believe I still identify strongly with the article and I believe that it is easy for consumers like me to forget that my purchasing actions have many consequences like children and people getting sick because of the plastic waste burning as a result of a recycling program that is largely bs.
But that doesn’t mean I am right, and I feel that it is quite important for me to realize that my sources of information are largely imperfect, often with huge biases present in them.
Is that really saying burning chlorinated plastics --- in particular --- causes climate change? That whole quote reads so oddly it's like it was written by a bot.
> There was no doubt in her mind: Smyla had put that envelope into her recycling bin. “That's polyethelene, and I'd recycle that. If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes,” she says. “I get a lot of Amazon packages, and they all go into the bin, too.”
> it was designed to effectively get people to buy more plastic.
I hate this kind of cynicism, because it's disempowering when the truth is so much more actionable. In reality, it was designed to be cheap and useful, and with the disposal costs handwaved [1] away.
Plastic can be overcome by developing equally useful and cheap materials.
[1] "handwaved" really understates the amount of effort that went into dealing with the disposal costs. You don't create national recycling programs and international standards by handwaving. But reality didn't pan out relative to the hopes.
I put heavy plastic in the recycling (like laundry detergent bottles) because an interview with a recycler on PlanetMoney implied that was still valuable stuff.
> If it’s got the recycling symbol on it, into the bin it goes
I wonder if she actually means the resin identification code (RIC) and is confusing that with a recycling symbol. (Edit to add: as in “this is recyclable in your particular blue bin”)
She's not confused, the RIC literally is the recycling symbol by any useful definition of the word "symbol". The plastic industry intentionally adopted it in order to lie to their customers.
Another example of a symbol is a stop sign. When you see a stop sign with a slightly different color or font than you're used to, you (correctly) think "that's a stop sign, I should slow to a stop before proceeding". You don't think "that orange octagon that says STOP isn't the exact vector image that I saw in the textbook, so it could mean anything and I will just ignore it".
It's like if I bought fat-free milk that actually had fat in it, and the company said "oh you must have been confused, Fat-Free™ is our line of products for those who feel liberated to consume as much fat as they want".
I'm surprised municipal recycling programs, or national governments themselves, don't try to at least educate people about this.
Where I live, the dumpster area usually has at least one information board or sticker describing what the colors of the bins mean, and what goes into which. It shouldn't be hard to also include an explanation like "Pay attention: ♲ - this is a recycling symbol; ♳ - this is a resin identification code".
It is a recycling symbol for sure. It doesn’t mean “so put this in your blue bin” because your blue bin processing is probably not set up to separate all the different resins.
I know, but I'm saying it does mean that. The plastic manufacturer is attempting to communicate "you can put this in the blue bin". You are understanding the message correctly, and it's not your fault that the message is a lie.
The plastics manufacturer can’t possibly control or even know the details of your local waste management system. They’re telling you what the item is made of. Whether your specific municipality has invested enough to recycle that material is not knowable to them.
You are correct. That RIC is a good way to know whether your local waste management system can accept the item.
GP is also correct, in that this RIC could have been a number surrounded by (say) a circle, a square, or a pentagon -- but instead, the manufacturers of plastic deliberately chose a triangle, *because it looks very much like the official "this is recyclable" symbol* as a calculated tactic to rely on people being misled by this similarity.
If most people understood how little of their plastic is actually recyclable, they might re-examine what they buy, and how often.
It's an easy mistake for people to make. Even identifying something as "polyethylene" is ambiguous. If it's polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or "high-density polyethylene" (HDPE) then it is very likely recyclable. But if it's "low-density polyethylene" (plastic bags) then in principle it is recyclable but likely isn't through normal curbside pickup.
If she's identifying it as polyethylene it's a good bet she's actually looking at the RIC. That said, I don't see a lot of plastics that have a recycling symbol and not have a RIC. I'm sure it depends on where you live and what products you consume, so I wouldn't necessarily assume that her experience was the same.
This is just sad. I live in an Indian metro, in an upper middle class neighborhood, and recently saw a pile of plastic burning on the side of our street. This happens infrequently (handful of times in a year), but only because of the pressure from the residents here who can afford to apply power to push it out of our neighborhood.
The smoke is dense, white and spreads quickly. It has a strong smell to it and quickly seeps into adjacent homes (which are 5 storied apartment buildings, so it reaches a lot of people). It gives me a headache that lasts for at least a couple of hours.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in Muzaffarnagar (city from article) next to one of these plastic burning facilities if one small pile on my street had such a big impact on my family's wellbeing.
> Around Muzaffarnagar, respiratory problems such as asthma and bronchitis along with eye infections associated with air pollution and the burning of plastic are on the rise, up as much as 30% over the last few years, according to Muzaffarnagar’s chief medical officer.
Mainstream narrative over-indexes on long-term impact of global warming vs. the shorter term health impacts of pollution. This makes sense: when developed countries dictate global media narrative, they're not going to focus on the pollution aspect much because it doesn't impact them in a tangible, day-to-day basis.
But the immediate health impact is a stronger narrative: there are people who are impacted by it every day and are dying. It has a face to it. We need a lot more coverage on this front. Grateful for this article.
I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about “plastic roads”.
Many countries, desperate to make use of the gargantuan flow of waste plastic, and desperate to avoid it going into landfill, are putting the waste plastic into roads.
This is called “recycling”.
Sounds like a great idea until you realize that cars and trucks drive on the roads and grind them into dust - dust containing microplastics.
The microplastic dust will go into air, waterways, rivers, oceans, food, plants animals and people.
All this is because the environmentalists have decided that “keeping plastics out of landfill” is more important than anything.
Plastic roads are an environmental disaster in an epic scale being created in the name of “recycling”.
The worst thing is that for some reason it’s not obvious that this is a disastrous idea, and all around the world people are breathlessly talking up plastic roads like its a solution to the plastic waste problem.
“In 2015, the Indian government made it mandatory for plastic waste to be used in constructing roads near large cities of more than 500,000 people”
You realize what polyester is right? All those fleeces made out of recycled bottles and the polyester clothing that every single kid wears are all shedding microplastics constantly into the environment.
> Microplastics were present in all samples except one, with a count of approximately 40 microplastic particles per cubic metre of seawater on average. They found that synthetic fibres made up 92 per cent of the microplastic pollution in these samples, and 73 per cent of this is polyester.
Being aware that everything is plastic is kind of horrifying. Stuffed animals? Plastic. Car seats? Plastic. Diapers? Plastic. carpeting? Sleeping bags? Backpacks? Curtains? Yeah it’s all 100% plastics unless you’re buying very high end
It’s not that hard to get cotton/wool clothing, though wool is definitely pricier than spun plastic. I’ve had much more trouble with furniture, though, there’s a much larger price premium there for whatever reason.
> I’ve had much more trouble with furniture, though, there’s a much larger price premium there for whatever reason.
Logistics, probably. Wooden furniture is heavy. Much heavier than furniture made from modern, plastic-infused materials. This weight increase generates additional costs at every step between the manufacturer and your living room.
(I guess traditional materials might also be less suitable for making flat-packed furniture that can be assembled by the buyer.)
Also, while it certainly wouldn't surprise me if plastic roads produce more microplastics than plastic landfills, I wouldn't take it as given. Landfills aren't frozen in time, stuff degrades and gets blown around by wind, and I have no idea how the process of making a road affects the plastics and their capacity to degrade.
Oceanic plastic comes from 10 major rivers, 8 of them in Asia[1,2].
Which is to say, while landfill escape is certainly possible - when it comes to plastic, it's essentially not a problem at all compared to just the ongoing and continuous dumping of plastic into the oceans where it degrades to microplastics.
Landfills, properly managed (i.e. no liquid chemicals in them) are shaping up as the best option environmentally because they're local and while not completely frozen in time, certainly frozen enough. You dig up a landfill, you'll largely find...everything which was originally put into it.
The amount of pollution from individual private cars is nominal, but the amount of pollution from cars en masse (especially in concentrated road structures like highways) is substantial[1]. It becomes even more substantial when you mix in commercial car (read: diesel) traffic[2].
> If you live on an interstate, and don't want to, the best course of action is to move.
Sometimes you don't live on an interstate, but the interstate moves next to you anyways[1].
Other times, you live in a beautiful residential neighborhood (like I do), but 18-wheelers drive through your neighborhood and idle next to the public schools because there's no enforcement and it's convenient.
He got a high from breathing straight from the exhaust pipe. Then the Lord appeared to him and said, "And you shall make it known, on HN, that the exhaust pipe is not the enemy, but the friend."
Well, that's a different set of circumstances, where you've got a lot of very badly-made cars with ineffective emissions control systems running on very poor-quality fuel.
What if you use the plastic as a foundation or filler covered by a layer of asphalt?just curious if it’s possible to elongate the plastic tire interface and eliminate pulverization
This is the process described in the article. (Edit: the article even directly addresses this, with the suggestion, you can believe it or not, that this is intended to prevent microplastics generated from abrasion) I suppose you would still have to worry about, for example, what happens when you replace the road and recycle that asphalt - the asphalt with plastic admixture gets mixed into the whole batch and remelted. Assuming you kept track of which are the plastic roads you could still use the recycled asphalt (with more plastic waste?) as the base and use a layer of new asphalt on top, etc.
It may be that recycling your plastic is fully useless or even harmful, but there are municipalities where plastic in the recycled waste stream does get reprocessed into new products, and as one of the sibling comments notes, burying waste in a landfill isn't the obviously better solution either. It's also fine to have ire for the people who push plastic recycling for consumers without ensuring plastic waste gets into a stream where it's responsibly reprocessed. I'm sure there are some less-than-circumspect environmentalists who are responsible for this, but there are plenty of others, including politicians and industrialists who push recycling as a way to avoid reducing plastic consumption or to use still more single-use plastic items.
>> burying waste in a landfill isn't the obviously better solution either.
Plastics into landfill is better because the toxicity/microplastics are constrained to the immediate ecosystem of the landfill, rather than being distributed everywhere.
I am increasingly coming to wonder if the non-biodegradability of plastic should be regarded as a feature rather than a bug.
This stuff is made of oil. The last thing we want to do with oil, from an environmental standpoint, is turn it into greenhouse gases. The best way to accomplish that would be to leave it underground. Since we're not doing that, perhaps the second best thing is to convert it into a solid material and then put it back underground. It seems like landfills are our chance at keeping this stuff reasonably contained, and, in that setting, the fact that it lasts forever hopefully means that this carbon we dug up from underground won't end up in the atmosphere quite so quickly.
All other options seem to ultimately lead toward large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water pollution. Recycling seems to be, at best, a more scenic route to that same destination.
Because plastic producing companies have spent the last 40 years and a lot of money telling us that plastics are good "because they can be recycled" while not recycling and not addressing the very real problems caused by plastics because profit.
I don't know about "has become". I've known it to be the goal as far back as the 1980s. (Anything before then is before I started forming memories.)
I think it probably comes from the same place as organic food and suchlike: a conflation of "more natural" with "better for the environment." They're not necessarily the same thing, and we're finding increasingly many situations where doing things in a "more natural" way is actually pretty terrible for the earth's ecosystems when seven billion humans are trying to do it at a planetary scale.
If only we had a few orders of magnitude more trees, or some other way to turn the CO2 back into oil more quickly, that would be the ultimate recycling.
> Laurie Smyla, a 73-year-old retiree from Sloatsburg, New York [...] Smyla has a degree in environmental science and even served as coordinator for the local recycling program in the late 1980s, as she explains when reached by phone. She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic.
I gotta wonder, how many people did the reporters have to contact before finding the perfect subject to put a human angle on this part of the story. Kudos to them for doing the legwork
So, in my city, there's a warehouse, they buy Amazon returns and surplus in bulk, every week on the same day, they fill shallow elevated bins ideal for picking through with the items. Day 1 everything is $25 an item, the price reduces each day until everything is $1 on day 7. It is a great low cost (it's actually profitable), probably profitable enough that if Amazon ran these themselves they could pay to process all the waste in an eco friendly way and not lose money.
Lots of places take Amazon returns and do something similar. There's an auction house near me that regularly auctions pallets of returns from amazon. A relative of mine used to run a store where she'd buy those pallets and repair the items and resale them. Usually most things are returned work fine, or are missing something you could get from lowes.
Amazon doesn't test a lot of their returns and they get sent out like that.
Bargain Hunt's business model is entirely reselling amazon returns.
Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally.
As well as reducing plastic usage in low value applications. It is sad, all the plastic litter in the world.
An waste industry buddy of mine designs landfills, and this is his take too. It's better to throw your plastic into regular trash (and other recyclables into the recycle bin), because then you at least know it's likely to end up in a landfill where it's safe, instead of being exported and dumped in the sea.
Most modern landfills have power stations that burn off these gases for electricity or heat for local consumption.
The ones that don't can be GHG emitters, but that just means there are less emissions somewhere else (where trash was collected from), because you just concentrated a bunch of matter in one place. It's not a significant net emitter.
Which is why it pains me so much that my municipality doesn't include (at least a household food scrap sized) compost bin with standard garbage service. They only offer a giant and expensive yard-waste bin.
That's why I mentioned long term, as you expand the time horizon you consider it over, landfill for plastics gets worse as it starts to decompose compared with incinerating with energy recovery or recycling.
Define long-term? I think that, as you expand the time horizon, you'll first reach the point at which the landfill gets buried, effectively sequestering the plastics and the carbon within.
Waste-to-energy plants have been utilized for a couple of decades in Sweden. There's several new plants in the USA.
I think it's more likely that regulated and aggregated pollution management will be at least somewhat successful. These plants will buy up vast sums of waste that would otherwise often get into the environment and oceans. Honestly with good air scrubbing it could replace many of our coal plants with better air quality outcomes.
HN is busy telling me over and over again that power from coal and natural gas is dirty and cannot feasibly be filtered to be clean, so the only way to go is nuclear, which doesn't have any problems at all. How come we can burn plastic of all things in a clean way?
Your comment has excessive hyperbole and isn't constructive to discourse.
Even pro nuclear folks will recognize that it has drawbacks and needs to be managed carefully. They believe that those drawbacks are less than that of fossil fuels and that nuclear can be ramped up faster than renewables.
As the other person points out, with power there are alternatives that are basically 1:1 (electricity is fungible for the most part). With plastic, we do not have readily available replacements for every kind out there, and if we burn them in controlled, concentrated points, then (hopefully) we can scrub and filter the air at the point of emissions.
I think it's become apparent that the whole recycling concept is misguided. There's just not enough economic value in these materials to justify the socialized cost. It's better to dump the waste into proper landfills.
Ultimately environmental impact is mostly about CO2 release these days. We're not running out of most of these raw materials. And for the one big one we are (oil) having it end up buried in a landfill is about the best realistic option we have today.
Don't be so quick to throw the entire concept of recycling in the bin (so to speak). Plastic recycling may be a scam, but metal recycling is simultaneously economical, effective, and better for the environment than extracting new metals. Steel, copper, and aluminum are all successfully recycled in vast quantities; the majority of the metal we produce these days was recycled rather than fresh-from-the-ore.
Metal recycling is fine and there was a thriving industry in metal recycling before anyone heard of "recycling". Metal recycling also does not require any subsidies. Your typical auto junkyard is a good example.
The issue is the small scale household recycling that does require subsidies and is a strain on local government budgets. You are basically cutting needed services to the community such as funds for libraries, parks, police, and schools in order to subsidize good feels for upper middle class households, which is a regressive and wasteful policy.
This is really a technological issue -- in 15 years, it might make sense to recycle something else, but then a market will develop and cities wont have to pay to do it, as it will pay for itself. But regardless of future breakthroughs, it's unlikely that we will ever be able to recycle a substantial proportion of household waste.
Yes! Metal is extremely recyclable. I think the biggest problem was the move to single stream in nearly every US municipality. We should have 3 different bins. This requires more personal responsibility and more infrastructure, but it is far easier to separate at the waste source than in a massive dump of every crushed together in India or elsewhere.
It really depends on the specific material. Recycling aluminum gives huge energy savings, something like 95% reduction in energy, because refining bauxite is a bitch. Bottle-to-bottle PET recycling also works, but most other forms of plastic recycling are a farce.
Sure, but consumers use tiny amounts of metal that can be recycled. A can a day is like 10 pounds a year or about $4 worth of scrap. It borders on pointless and certainly is with the associated negatives of the way recycling is done today.
So yeah if you want to collect all your metal scrap for a year and bring it to the local yard then yeah that's a net positive. But skipping a single plane trip is probably worth an entire lifetime of recycling.
According to wikipedia, the amount of aluminum cans recycled is actually substantial:
> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore.[4] For this reason, approximately 36% of all aluminium produced in the United States comes from old recycled scrap.[5] Used beverage containers are the largest component of processed aluminum scrap, and most of it is manufactured back into aluminium cans.[6]
This seems to line up with the fact that you can actually get paid for aluminum cans, the metal used aluminum cans are made of has enough value that it actually makes economic sense to pay people to recycle them.
Looks like that goes to a dead cite but I can find similar numbers from the aluminum trade organization. They don't have an actual methodology that I can see but it's probably safe to assume they're cherry picking numbers. The most likely way is that they're comparing energy used in ore at the factory vs scrap at the factory. That will heavily favor scrap because it excludes all the energy taken to transport it.
>This seems to line up with the fact that you can actually get paid for aluminum cans, the metal used aluminum cans are made of has enough value that it actually makes economic sense to pay people to recycle them.
It's not economically viable to send trucks to pick up people's recycling like most cities do. As an example, my city charged $120 per residence to do that.
You've got to account for everything that goes into the typical single stream recycling we do. The emissions of the trucks, the sorting plants, and the cost to pay people to do this. I've not see an analysis that tracks the carbon emissions of all these to see if it outweighs what we get from recycling. But looking at the dollar flow it seems basically impossible that it's a net positive. You just can't charge $120 a year to haul away $30 of scrap (or less) and end up with a carbon savings.
Yeah I recycle glass, cardboard, metal, and "high quality" clean plastic (mostly bottles). Bags, wrappers, envelopes, food containers, any sort of foam, and other similar packaging/padding material goes to the landfill.
This is not correct at all. Environmental scientists are developing a more sophisticated framework to describe the safe operating envelope for humans and it includes plastic and novel entities.
A Dutch newspaper wrote a depressing article¹ two years ago in a similar vain about plastic from the Netherlands ending up in Türkiye for 'recycling'. The same story, just different countries.
There are a lot of actors pushing for municipalities to collect plastic separately (like paper and glass), but stories like these make you wonder if that even makes sense at this point.
Yeah this is what’s bothering about these articles (common at least in American journalism) that condescendingly talk about issues in third world countries that are as bad in the US.
Not that we shouldn’t identify these things. But the issue is often not quite related to the country, but a larger issue.
As others have pointed out, for whatever reason, plastic is difficult to recycle and through deception, we’ve been sold the idea that it can be recycled.
The most promising stuff I’ve seen is waste to energy (basically, burn the stuff). As long as we can effectively capture the emitted toxins from burning the plastic, then it seems like a pretty good system. And some countries have already been doing this.
I am trying to start a local 3D printing business, where a lot of basic parts or things people need can be made locally with Amazon style 2-day delivery. The order just goes to someone in your area who is certified to make stuff. I think this could massively help our global logistics and waste problems, and be a boon to local economies. https://HeyRobot.org Please get in touch if anyone is interested in joining in this project. I work on it nights and weekends… No VCs, just me and some friends coding.
Does Amazon declare the financial and legal risks of externalizing the disposal costs of their plastic- and styrofoam-based (and cardboard!) packaging onto municipal recycling and waste processing?
For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?
Is this fee widespread and becoming moreso, or is it merely buried in the taxes for five counties out of five hundred thousand? Is it a financial risk to Amazon that consumers would rebel against being charged fees per bag/box?
> For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?
The bigger question is what would it cost the planet. For Amazon to collect and recycle the packages, rather than the local municipality, would enormously increase the amount of emissions created.
For Amazon to be forced to charge to the customer a small fee for each package shipped, modeled after the electronics recycling fee that California requires to be charged and disclosed at time of purchase, would create a financial risk to their revenue stream, by forcing Amazon to charge customers a fee for every different box and bag used — not to mention compelling customers to use the “reduce number of boxes” option by default, which forces Amazon to absorb the consolidation cost previous externalized by cheap shipping from multiple depots back into their logistics chain. Given only this one example, do those risks reach the levels of potential impact necessary to compel its disclosure in public filings? Are there other examples?
It's past time for state and local government to require large online retailers such as Amazon to provide a means of collecting shipping materials for recycling and reuse... This segment of our economy badly needs some gov regulation... For the sake of the planet
There is a way, that's the point of the entire article. They put it in the recycling.
If you are suggesting shipping the stuff back to Amazon, you should think about that a bit more - the amount of energy you'll use to ship it is an order of magnitude more than the amount you'll save.
You would be harming the planet in order to make it seem like you did a good thing.
For at least some types of retail products, it seems like a system of standardized, reusable containers could be workable - the same Amazon, UPS, USPS delivery vans that bring a constant stream of packages to my apartment building could collect and return them without much additional energy expenditure.
Possibly using something comparable to the German Flaschenpfand[1] system? I'm unsure of how to develop a suitable packing system that would be machine-friendly, possibly wooden crates packed with shredded cardboard packing. The lid could be press-in cardboard, something like that used in tinfoil food storage boxes, but reliant on the cardboard bending to get past the lip and into the region where it is secured. Alternately, a suitable slide-in wooden lid with a stopping peg inserted and sealed with a wax-type substance could be used (as per [2], with the addition of a sealing peg setup). Sealing wax would probably be used in the cardboard variant also.
Amazon handling recycling is not going to have any fewer problems than local governments doing it. The problem, ultimately, is that there's no way to responsibly extract value from recycling this sort of stuff. The choice is burying it or selling it to someone who will irresponsibly extract the value.
Interesting that plastic bottles that get accidentally shipped to India are still worth extracting and recycling.
> unmasked waste pickers sifted for metal cans or intact plastic bottles that could be sold
The plastic they burn is envelopes made of soft plastic that have been incorrectly sorted by the recycling process and bundled with paper that they do actually want.
The idea that we'll get Americans to properly dispose of plastic is not credible to me, without some kind of cultural shift that I don't expect (I'm aware that some other countries, perhaps Germany and Japan, are much more diligent about how you dispose of household waste).
I've observed a number of people who haven't seemed to internalize the current rules about what can be recycled. People especially want to think that thin plastic bags can go in the recycling with everything else. I don't think people are going to move away from single-stream recycling, which appears to be a big part of the problem.
Most telling is the person in the article with some experience working in the recycling industry who was ignorant of the fact that her curbside recycling program does not accept the blue and white Amazon mailers, nor did she know that the paper shipping label must be removed (often an impossible task without solvents or a lot of time and patience) prior to drop off at the supermarket collection bin.
I was a dutiful recycler until links here on HN taught me that plastic thrown in the main garbage stream would end up safely in a landfill, but 20% of recycled plastic ends up in the ocean!
> but 20% of recycled plastic ends up in the ocean!
I'm virtually certain that's not even close to true. I remember reading a study that pretended like that was the number, but looking closer the "study" was basically "let's make up numbers, and extrapolate them", and they didn't collect any actual data.
"If you put your plastic in your recycling bin, there’s a decent chance it will end up in the seas off east Asia. If you put it in landfill, it’s going nowhere"
That article isn't terrible, but it links to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... which essentially calculated that since x% of trash in a country goes to the ocean, then a similar % of recycled material that that country receives also goes to the ocean. (It's not the study I read, but it makes the same error.)
This is a false connection. Countries pay money for recycling, they are not going to turn around and dump that valuable material in the ocean.
Contrary to what many people think, recycling producers do NOT pay poor countries to accept plastic, it's the other way around.
I'm not completely sure, but I don't think that's true for plastic bottles. Maybe it's the best approach because it's simpler and people can adhere to it, but I think if you could get people to follow the rules, recycling bottles and throwing away thin plastic would be better.
A friend of mine had this boyfriend once who ran a business that used recycled glass. Something to do with producing high quality sand for filtration systems and some other interesting processes (can't remember exactly what it was anymore bummer). The sand was made out of ground glass from wine bottles. As he told me, his process required just the right kind of glass and it had to be very, very clean. There was substantial investment into washing and label removal, to produce the right inputs. He said it was barely worthwhile, and he said that most plastic and even glass recyclables are just too dirty and too mixed up for it to be worthwhile. Al and Fe cans and Cu wire on other hand are absolutely a go.
I ordered a small item from Amazon about a few months ago and it came in a paper envelope which was light weight but padded with a corrugated paper mesh which was not rigid like cardboard. At the time I thought, “This is the perfect replacement for those plastic blue and white envelopes!” But every small item since then has been shipped in the standard plastic envelopes. I don’t know what it would take to change all to these soft paper envelopes. If all retailers changed to these, it would be so much easier to recycle.
Burning waste correctly is actually a really good way to recycle. For example, Vienna incinerates it's garbage and plastic to provide heating for almost half the city. The emissions from burning 1 persons yearly garbage is estimated
It's estimated that incinerating the entire annual waste for one person in Vienna produces the same carbon emissions as driving a car 100 km. [0]
My partner signed us up. I'm skeptical. My understanding is they don't really know what to do with it but are trying various things. So not recycling per se, but using the scraps for other purposes, similar to how shredded tires can be used in playgrounds. I haven't heard anything great yet coming out of it though; there's simply not much you can do with bits of plastic that you can't do better and cheaper with something else, and the supply is always going to grossly outweigh any demand. My guess is it's just an expensive roundabout way to get to a landfill. I hope I'm wrong.
And bring the global economy to an instant standstill? No government is going to enact such a policy, no matter how environmentally friendly its politicians are; certainly not the ones running countries that produce plastic stuff.
We should at the very least stop producing and transporting around the globe useless items such as a plastic tree imported from China I saw on sale in Brazil.
A plastic tree in Brazil that came all the way from China! It's surreal.
Of course. But that doesn't change the fact that stopping the production of plastic crap within a few years is not an option beyond the hypothetical realm. Nor is convincing the majority of people to stop buying all that crap simply on the basis of a moral plea. Pricing in externalities might work eventually (and will take a few decades to realize at any significant scale).
I assure you even if we were to continue in our current trajectory the Earth would support human life for more than two lifetimes.
This is not to say that we shouldn't stop wasting, but let's not exaggerate. That being said the Earth definitely will become less comfortable if we don't put a pin on some of this stuff.
Conversely, were the global economy collapse completely, Earth will barely support human life for even one lifetime.
Obligatory reminder: unless you're Sentinelese, it's highly unlikely you or your community is actually self-sufficient. For most people, everything they eat, everything they wear, everything they live in and live with, is a product of, or is directly dependent on, international manufacturing and shipping. If that goes, billions of people starve.
One of the interesting things I found in this article is that I had no idea what the plastic amazon pouches they kept talking about actually were. Here in the UK amazon ship everything in recycled cardboard. Presumably that's from either environmental pressure of government legislation. Even the tape is paper.
I've been seeing ideas like this a lot lately and I really don't like them. If something that's been in widespread use for decades is bad for the environment, come up with a better alternative first, and only then stop producing the old thing.
Would you say the same if your home was coated in black plastic soot? Why should we hold course after mere decades of turning a blind eye toward the consequences of our lifestyle? Plastic pollution was not a problem for millennia. You come up with a better alternative to that.
I would rather have a home covered in black soot than the entire planet turned into a hyper-authoritaritan nightmare state just to reduce plastic waste.
The opposition parties in India like AAP and Congress are also playing a dirty game as they have investment in some of these companies, instead they blame random one off days like Diwali for fireworks to take the attention off this plastic and crop stubble burning
The real culprits are those who take attention off the real issues and just blame Diwali or one off festival days. Entire days and weeks of meat eating and fattening animals for meat is one of the real culprits of damage to the climate.
We should be saving this stuff in a safe large landfill here in the states. With improvements in recycling economy, perhaps in 25years a large plastic landfill would worth an lot of money. Trash futures anyone?
This was quite hard hitting. I mean, if you're a consumer in the US where even a simple piece of fruit comes packaged often in plastic, you know the piece of plastic isn't going to be completely recycled. I always thought this ends up in a landfill which is bad in itself!
There have been a few other outlets that have focused on this problem in the past. John Oliver did a segment too.
Are there any startups working in this space? Incineration is quite bad if the fumes aren't contained - is there research happening in controlling/eliminating toxins even if incineration is done?
This has been the reality since (just after) the onset of the recycle narrative took off. Noise is made, action never taken. The news outlets that show the horrific fatal diseases that children (with no other income) acquire through the scavenging has been a slow news day story for decades. See youtube - children, scavenge, dump. Anyone who sees the horrific waste of child-serving-sized coke plastic bottles, held together by more plastic, for 8$ at Target^ should be disgusted by the unavoidable sins of the US capitalist culture.
^You can get glass bottles held together by cardboard for slightly less, not that I'm advocating this purchase either.
If you reread the article you'll find that this is not about burning a small amount of plastic contamination.
> India may be bringing in as much as 500,000 tons of plastic waste hidden within paper shipments annually, according to a government environmental body that estimated the level of contamination at 5%.
I did read the article, and I consider 5% a small amount.
The plastic is being burned for energy, which is the best way to handle plastic.
The only real issue this article raised is the poor quality incinerators, that don't do a good enough job of burning the plastic. I call this article click bait because they spend way way too long on utterly irrelevant stuff, and the only important part is 2 sentences.
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