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China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

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Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#81
post #43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years That line is more false than true. For the most part they are not recycling their trash, they are incinerating it. Additionally Sweden is tiny. Trash there is brought to local recycling centers with 6 to 8 or more different bins, and people are expected to sort their trash. How would you do that in the US? Trucks with 8 compartments? Where would you e…

Am in the US, transport my recycling right now as there is no pickup in my county.

How far are you traveling? It's very very very unlikely that what you are doing is actually good for the environment, unless you are making a trash run only every few months.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#82

We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists. The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a…

Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on. The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due…

>What are some alternatives? Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?

Yes. Beaverages from glass bottles taste better. This is probably just ones own taste.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#83
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, yes. Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough). Paper bags are also a great technology. I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working…

Glass is a terrible material in a recycling sense, as it's weight makes transport costly and wasteful (fuel). The raw material is essentially sand (silica) which we're not going to run out of, soon. Burying it in a landfill won't make a worst landfill - it's essentially inert. It's literally better to NOT recycle glass than to recycle it. Reuse it.

I don't understand why it's better to not recycle glass. Yes transporting used glass is costly, but isn't collecting and transporting sand even more costly? And while we won't run out of sand, good sand is limited. Or can you use any sort of sand to produce glass instead of a specific type of sand? Doesn't refining sand into glass take additional energy compared to melting existing glass?

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#84

We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists. The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a…

Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on. The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due…

I always ask for paper bags. Environmentalism aside, they make great free trash bags.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#85
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years That line is more false than true. For the most part they are not recycling their trash, they are incinerating it. Additionally Sweden is tiny. Trash there is brought to local recycling centers with 6 to 8 or more different bins, and people are expected to sort their trash. How would you do that in the US? Trucks with 8 compartments? Where would you e…

> you can't expect people to transport their recycling Why on earth not? The majority used to haul their own garbage to the town dump a just few decades ago (and some still do in smaller towns). Ubiquity of curbside pickup is relatively new -- doubly so for recycling. And recyclables are a heck of a lot more pleasant to carry in the car than rotting kitchen scraps.

And if you don't have a car? Or are not strong enough to carry lots of trash?

Or the dump is far enough away to make transporting recycling counterproductive?

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#86
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on. The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due…

> Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags? If you put a price (read: tax) on plastic, I'm sure many folks would jump at the opportunity of replacing plastic-heavy stuff with no/minimal plastic options possibly using glass or paper (or metal where things are disposable that shouldn't be). Thing is, plastic has a subsidized price right now due to petroleum supply chain being subsidized - plastic is a byproduc…

Not necessarily. In 2004, Germany introduced a 25 cent deposit on single-use plastic bottles [1] for types of beverages where single-use bottles were much more common than reusable bottles. The intention was like you describe: to encourage consumers and manufacturers to prefer reusable bottles. However, the opposite happened.

In the first few months after the law came into power, each retailer would only take back bottles purchased at their own stores, leading to a public outcry. Retailers eventually came together to form a single deposit system for single-use bottles. Bottles purchased from any of the participating retailers could now be returned to any other participating retailer.

That's something that's pretty much impossible for reusable bottles: When you return a reusable bottle, the store that takes it back must have a supply chain to ship the bottle back to the corresponding beverage factory. Single-use bottles, on the other hand, are just destroyed and recycled, so the supply chain is much easier.

In the end, the deposit system for single-use bottles functioned so well (both for customers and retailers) that manufacturers switched from reusable to single-use bottles. For example, Coca-Cola used to produce only reusable bottles (and single-use aluminum cans). Now they sell a large amount of single-use bottles. A lot of retailers (e.g. the almighty discount chains) sell only single-use bottles because they don't want to bother with collecting reusable bottles.

[1] For comparison: Deposits on reusable bottles are either 8 cents (glass, e.g. beer) or 15 cents (plastic, e.g. juices; sometimes glass, e.g. brand sodas).

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#87

We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists. The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a…

Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on. The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due…

> We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due respect to the long term consequences.

Those properties are also used in place of other materials. Gears in devices that were once metal are now plastic which works OK for w while but it's not even close to the durability of metal.

The result is the device with plastic gears fails and a new one is made to replace it, maybe two or three times in a decade. Meanwhile a device with metal gears may last decades.

How many vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, microwave ovens from the 1970s and 1980s are still in use versus the same devices from the 1990s/2000s?

Modular devices that can be updated to suit whims of fashion. And technology which use durable metal parts would make more sense and cut down on plastic waste plus the sheer volume of old failed devices.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#89
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, yes. Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough). Paper bags are also a great technology. I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working…

Glass is a terrible material in a recycling sense, as it's weight makes transport costly and wasteful (fuel). The raw material is essentially sand (silica) which we're not going to run out of, soon. Burying it in a landfill won't make a worst landfill - it's essentially inert. It's literally better to NOT recycle glass than to recycle it. Reuse it.

That's surprising to me. By not recycling glass you pay the fuel costs to move that glass to a landfill and you pay the fuel costs to move sand to your glass production facility.

Is the final cost lower just because landfills and sand are everywhere, but recycling facilities are farther away?

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#90
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, yes. Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough). Paper bags are also a great technology. I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working…

Recycling glass is essentially pointless. It costs the same amount of energy to recycle glass (possibly even more, due to transport) as it does to just make new glass, and we're never going to run out of sand.

The raw materials for making new glass also need to be transported. Why is transporting raw materials better for the environment than transporting existing glass?
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