Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 293 posts

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#181

Post by mehrdadn »

dang wrote: post #97
czps wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know the industry but it seems to me that if the “trash” was bought by Chinese companies only to be dumped there for the most part then it’s still trash. Was it cheaper to ship this stuff to China than to pay American landfills to handle this stuff? I don’t think having someone pay for it matters. Isn’t it the end result that matters?

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. There are legit use…

> Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum.

There's an interesting middle ground here which is to let users specify whatever username nobody else has ever used for their posts. Then they can choose to link them to prior posts (or not) as they see fit. It's not clear to me that this prevents having a community, but I'm not sure what the consequences are.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#182

Post by deepGem »

49para wrote: post #167
mikewilliams wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recycling will never be profitable, but we can't just keep burying trash and forgetting about it, or maybe we can, I don't know.

Or perhaps we could just stop creating it in the first place. Is there really a need for all of the one use plastics or the excessive packaging ?

My city Bangalore effectively enforced a plastic ban. So some grocery stores now only have paper bags even to pack veggies. I think it's doable. The government enforced the ban as there was no alternative, we don't have enough space for landfills.

A city like Singapore however uses a lot of plastic and thermocol. I wonder where they find space for their landfills. Probably they are doing the same, exporting all the trash to China or Indonesia.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#183

Post by mirimir »

dredmorbius wrote: post #52
nostrademons wrote: post #18

It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…

In many ways, China's chief export for the past two decades has been its environmental sink capacity -- that is, absorbing both pollution and extractive environmental disruption.

It hasn't just been China. Pharmaceutical manufacturing in India is an environmental disaster.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#184

Post by martinald »

gambiting wrote: post #83
cc81 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In countries with good waste management I assume they are burned if they are not recycled. Other containers such as paper might sometimes even be worse as it will cost more energy to produce them than plastic.

>>In countries with good waste management I assume they are burned if they are not recycled Those countries are so rare that it's almost not worth mentioning. Vast majority of places around the world, including most of the developed world do not have "good waste management" by this definition. Even in countries as rich as UK, Germany and France most waste goes to a landfill, not an incinerator. Sure Sweden shows a go…

Not true in the UK anymore. Nearly every local authority has or has under construction a 'waste to energy' plant (incinerator). Most of South London's waste has been burnt since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELCHP, for example.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#185

Post by mirimir »

ineedasername wrote: post #164
JulianMorrison wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an illusion. Specifically, it was an illusion that allowed capitalism as normal to largely continue, with a bit of greenwashing here and there. Things you can actually recycle: Aluminium, iron/steel scrap, and to a lesser extent glass. Plastic was never recyclable in the sense of "circular economy indefinitely". Recycling was never an effective way to save resources, compared to its ugly stepsisters "reuse" an…

Paper must be recyclable, or else all of these "made from 100% recycled paper product" things wouldn't be possible, nor the many actual plants the recycle paper.

Sure. But it's only clean paper that's recyclable. And not just clean paper, but the right kind of paper. Low-lignin paper and high-lignin (e.g., newsprint) can't be mixed.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#186

Post by xefer »

nostrademons wrote: post #18

It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…

Re-reading this article from The New York Times Magazine, “Recycling Is Garbage” (1996) is really interesting today. It goes over the whole panic that kicked off the recycling movement during that time period.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

I had almost forgotten the story of the Mobro 4000. For days the national press was obsessed with watching it try to find a place to offload.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#187

Post by mirimir »

skriticos2 wrote: post #158
sverhagen wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume there's a lot of things cheaper to recycle than to create new, but the problem is how to extract/separate it out of an overwhelming stream of unrelated materials, is it not?

Person from Germany here where we have 4 different bins per household - paper, recyclables (metal, plastic), compostables and dump (+ glass by color, batteries and electronics at dedicated sites). We get to a recycling rate of about 20-30% (effective at plant) with really wanting to and having it ingrained into our culture. Recycling is hard at the best of times. Unless packaging gets much better at identifying as re…

Damn, I had no clue that it was just 20-30%. That's depressing.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#188

Post by mirimir »

dpark wrote: post #180
mirimir wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the "reduce" part. But just how does one roll back packaging practices? I can't imagine how that would work. Maybe the German model. But in the US? It seems unlikely.

What is the German model? I don’t recall there being a massive difference in packaging there except for the reusable (deposit required) soda bottles.

Extreme source separation. And laws that impose waste-management costs on manufacturers. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411646 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411250

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#189

Post by nopacience »

nostrademons wrote: post #18

It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…

No! China was not buying them.

See this:

1) My company has waste, it collected from many homes at a cost of 2000 dollars.

2) We the company, pays 1000 dollars for your company to take this trash. Its around 500 dollars to deliver to your place (china) and 500 dollars for your company

3) The company in china uses some land anywhere to dump it at "zero" cost

in the end with the $2000 total budget, my company makes 1000, we ship it and another company that makes 500 and use 500 to deliver to some place that will dump anywhere.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#190

Post by dgzl »

nostrademons wrote: post #18

It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…

I moved around some last year, and locals I met in New Mexico and Illinois would swear that their local recycling organization simply throws away their recycling into the landfill.
Post reply on HN