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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

#101

Post by justinator »

thefifthsetpin wrote: post #89
justinator wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think there's a lot of things to juggle around when trying to figure it out. Here's one situation, though:

What's more dense in material: a 10" by 4' by 4' pallet of old jugs, or a 10" by 4' by 4' pallet of sand?

I'm saying the latter - we're essentially shipping air as the majority of the material. So, more trucks need to ship the same amount of material.

That's just one example.

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

#102

Post by justinator »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #83
justinator wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For one truck load, how much sand can you carry per volume, vs. old glass bottles? For the latter, aren't you mostly transporting air?

You don't want to BREAK the glass bottles, since they still need to be sorted, and cleaned.

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

#103

Post by cashsterling »

I am not an expert but I am a PhD chemical engineer and I have though about this issue for years and years.

My 0.02...

Short term

---------------

a) give houses smaller trash cans and charge a lot for bigger trash cans. Town I live in already does this... at first I was like "wtf with this tiny trash can... I can throw away like one, two bags of trash tops per week"... well, now my household of 4 averages one bag of half full bag of trash per week. we do more composting and more recycling.

b) double down on recycling programs and sorting.

Short- to Mid-term

--------------------

c) we should be burning 100% of our actual trash in localized facilities. We trade the negative of immediate CO2 green gas emissions but we get:

-- some power in return

-- reduced diesel fuel use (at like 4 miles a gallon)... assuming the trip to local burn facility is shorter than out of landfill

-- huge reduction methane release from landfill,

-- 100% elimination of continued landfill pollution and water table pollution by god knows what (drugs, plastics, leaking batteries, etc.

The CO2 effluent stream can be captured and processed in many interesting ways. The CO2 is so clean it can be used for beverage or biotech service and/or feed for a CO2 to polymer (plastic building block) plant.

Many modern burn facilities burn so hot [and completely] they could be certified to deal with bio-hazard and chemical weapon destruction. They have gas scrubbing systems advamced enough that only N2, O2, and CO2 are emitted from the plant (NOx, SOx, etc. level are parts per billion levels)... no complex chemical species, no metals, leave the plant through the gas effluent.

We were/are doing this... but all this NIMBY nonsense is leading to some collectively destructive group-think... many folks don't want to see burn facilities near their house and there is a lot of money to be made in our current trash mismanagement system. Actually, most of our thinking is collectively destructive group-think so "what's new?"

Edit: http://www.lacsd.org/solidwaste/swfacilities/rtefac/commerce... I visited that facility in the 90's... it was great. Now it is closing... not sure if it being replaced.

Long-term

------------

d)We need packaging laws and taxes that address waste caused by excessive/unnecessary packaging... particularly for commercial/industrial use.

e)Society needs to refocus our value system to value simplicity and localized self-sufficiency: local fresh food over packaged/frozen goods, more reusable (and infinitely recycle-able) locally filled glass containers

f) localized recycle-to-manufacturing pipelines. Imagine a future where you could take polyethylene scrap down to a local facility get it 3D printed into something you or someone else can use (or get a spool of PE line to use in your own 3D printer at home).

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

#104

Post by Grazester »

state_less wrote: post #29
JulianMorrison wrote: post #7

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…

Yes with the glass bottles please.

In the Caribbean Soda use to come in glass bottle with a $0.50 deposit. You would never find a bottle on the side of the street, kids lamented losing their deposit if they broke a bottle(also ran the risk of getting yourself cut if you did) so they made sure to hold on to those bottles with both hands. Now soda comes in a plastic bottle with no deposit on it and isn't recycled on the island. The side of roads and nearby bushes are filled with these plastic bottles. Drains are clogged with them. Its an absolute nuisance. I dont know why the government even allowed the switch over to plastic....Ok I lied, I know. the glass bottles were costly to the breweries and they are the government biggest campaign supporters.

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

#105

Post by theandrewbailey »

justinator wrote: post #62
mjevans wrote: 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.

Depending on which kind is used to make glass, we actually are running out of sand.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-r...

http://www.businessinsider.com/world-running-out-sand-resour...

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

#106

Post by pwg »

ars wrote: post #24
rmshea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should serve as a wake up call for the rest of the world. Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years, most notably touting the fact that they import other countries' trash to use in their recycling plants [1]. How can we recreate Sweden’s model in the US and have our own solution to the trash problem instead of giving it to China? [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s…

> 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…

> The US is very large, you can't expect people to transport their recycling.

It is common in rural settings in the US for people to transport, themselves, both their trash and their recycling to a central drop off point. So there are lots of US residents that do exactly this periodically.

Curbside pickup is typically a system found in more urban portions of the US, but it is far from ubiquitous across the entirety of the US.

Edit: Adding this URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.0802698,-82.5981852,107m/dat...

This is a google satellite image of the local, central, trash drop off point in a very rural portion of southern Virginia.

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

#107

Post by 628C6l0 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #77
gowld wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the irony. World consumers asked for plastic. China provided it, and doesn't want to take it back.

Yep. We designed the products, and the packaging. Then ordered that exact combination to be manufactured in China. You don't get to order a balsa wood table, of your own design, from a woodworker, and then complain that they won't take the balsa wood back when you want to throw the flimsy table away. Especially when you specifically asked them to make the table from balsa wood.

You must be Chinese spy! Get him!

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

#109

Post by 628C6l0 »

contactanother wrote: post #41
mtw wrote: post #23

Is it me or there's been recently China articles with a negative bias recently on hacker news?

Pretty easy to be negative on China when all the news come out of there are: dictatorship, imprisonment millions in concentration camps and brainwashes them, builds artificial islands and claim ownership of seas not even close to their land, blatantly disregards WTO rules and closes off its market to others, hacks and steals other countries and their companies IP, threatens to attack a democratic Taiwan every day, ce…

Nuke China.

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

#110

Post by 628C6l0 »

justinator wrote: post #73
p3llin0r3 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western nations aren't the problem, it's developing countries with poor waste infrastructure and industrial vessels. https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

Yeah, we're the problem. It's OUR plastic that China isn't allowing in anymore.

No we're not the fucking problem. We are the good guys.
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