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

nytimes.com

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

#281

Post by Dylan16807 »

blablablabla991 wrote: post #269
Dylan16807 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many types of wasteful packaging work better for them , when they don't have to pay a lot of the costs. That doesn't mean they're the better overall choice.

Why would THEY have to pay the costs, and not their customers? Presumably, if the costs for packaging would go up, packaging industry would also rice the prices to make up for it?

Charging the customers at point of purchase is perfectly fine and equivalent. Customers are already indirectly paying, the point is to move that cost to a point where it's super obvious and affects purchasing decisions.

Customers as a group were already paying the cost of the garbage, but there was no pressure on the manufacturers to reduce it. Once you make the change then the total cost is the same, but now reducing packaging can improve a manufacturer's profit margin[1], even if it costs them a tiny bit more to make! This pushes things toward reduced waste, with the total number of [shelf price + garbage harm] dropping by some number of pennies.

[1] Even if you charge the customer directly, presumably the manufacturer still wants to hit a specific shelf price.

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

#282

Post by rdtsc »

philwelch wrote: post #276
rdtsc wrote: post #19

> In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. I heard other cities doing that. It is interesting in municipalities where people diligently separate their recycling into multiple streams, everything neatly going into a separate bins and so on, and then it all goes and gets dumped in the landfill. That says som…

It's just an API migration. You can't actually start recycling until you start receiving pre-sorted waste streams, so you roll out the pre-sorted waste streams and just source all of them to the same landfill you've been using. Later, you can source some of the recycling streams (independently of each other, even) to recycling.

Except I think the migration is in the other direction, which makes it more interesting.

If you'd like to think in terms of software, it's like they had bought into the microservices trend year back, then migrated back to a monolith underneath but still left stateless microservices APIs and shims running on Docker containers spread throughout just so they can claim somewhere they still do "microservices" and feel good about themselves.

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

#283

Post by foxhop »

millstone wrote: post #200
foxhop wrote: post #199

I have a family of 5 (three young children). We don't bother trying to recycle paper or cardboard anymore. We compost it or use it in the garden as sheet mulch. Still our recycling bin fills faster than our "trash" due to packaging. I also make eco bricks out of any plastic bags or plastic wrappers.

Please share more about your eco bricks, this is the first I've heard of them. Is it as simple as filling a 2L plastic bottle with other plastics? Do you donate them, what are they used for?

I use Gatorade bottles. I'm currently using them between the studs in my shed to act as insulation.

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

#284

Post by aviv2 »

dang wrote: post #223
aviv2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was that a flamewar? I replied to a person who used 2 words in a discussion where there was no clear relation to the comment being replied to, and suggested they use a full sentence so that I can understand their point coherently.

The comment was insulting, and you'd already crossed into incivility before that. The reason we've banned you, though, is that you've done this way too much on HN—usually on the same topic—and ignored our requests to stop.

It is solely your own opinion that it was insulting. I believe your opinion/judgement of that comment is clouded by your overall personal disapproval and disagreement with my political and health-related views.

I simply stated that in order to have a discussion, a full sentence should be used. The commenter asking "Poverty? Marketing?" added absolutely nothing to the conversation and I asked him/her to clarify.

The other times that you say I've "crossed into incivility" have already been addressed by your previous warning to me from a few months ago, which I have since made it a point to not engage in what you referred to at the time as flamewars with regards to my topics. My comments often generate healthy debates and conversation.

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

#285

Post by pfdietz »

xorfish wrote: post #260
icelancer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a business or government pays you for it, then recycling is effective. If they don't, then obviously it isn't useful. I never really understood why people could not grasp this basic concept.

A much simpler concept is that you pay for the trash that you don't recycle. Switzerland recycles 93% of all glass bottles(color sorted by consumers) and 83% of all PET bottles. Everything else has to be burned in a plant with minimal emission to recycle energy. PET recycling is financed by a fee of around 2 cents per bottle that every manufacturer has to pay.

However, if the charge for trash is too high, it encourages littering, illegal dumping, and discourages public waste receptacles (which encourages littering even more).

This can only really work if the cost of disposal is baked into the goods at sale, and refunded for recycled goods. I suspect it would just end up causing people to use the landfills they have paid for.

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

#286

Post by xorfish »

pfdietz wrote: post #285
xorfish wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much simpler concept is that you pay for the trash that you don't recycle. Switzerland recycles 93% of all glass bottles(color sorted by consumers) and 83% of all PET bottles. Everything else has to be burned in a plant with minimal emission to recycle energy. PET recycling is financed by a fee of around 2 cents per bottle that every manufacturer has to pay.

However, if the charge for trash is too high, it encourages littering, illegal dumping, and discourages public waste receptacles (which encourages littering even more). This can only really work if the cost of disposal is baked into the goods at sale, and refunded for recycled goods. I suspect it would just end up causing people to use the landfills they have paid for.

Cost is around one dollar per 35 litre bag. There are no landfills for common trash. Average is around 80 dollars per person per year. Less if you use PPP-Dollars. That is not enough to cover all cost of proper disposal, so the rest is payed by the state.

Point is, it works. There is no excuse for other countries to do the same.

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

#287

Post by blablablabla991 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #281
blablablabla991 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would THEY have to pay the costs, and not their customers? Presumably, if the costs for packaging would go up, packaging industry would also rice the prices to make up for it?

Charging the customers at point of purchase is perfectly fine and equivalent. Customers are already indirectly paying, the point is to move that cost to a point where it's super obvious and affects purchasing decisions. Customers as a group were already paying the cost of the garbage, but there was no pressure on the manufacturers to reduce it. Once you make the change then the total cost is the same, but now reducin…

You mean indirectly paying because of the costs of pollution, that society pays for?

But garbage disposal already costs money, doesn't it? Maybe it doesn't cost enough - but then rising prices for garbage disposal would at least have similar effect to mandating multi use packaging, without the market distortion?

The difference is that garbage disposal is the price for the actual damage that needs to be avoided. Multi use packaging is just an idea for avoiding it, without proof of overall effectiveness.

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

#288

Post by lsllc »

buttcoinslol wrote: post #208
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you that anything metal gets recycled. It's much cheaper to recycle than dig more ore out of the ground. tosses brake rotors in city recycling pickup bucket

In my neighborhood, you can leave metal objects on the curb and they're gone within hours, loaded into a pickup or trailer and taken to the scrap metal recyclers for cash. That came in handy when I was doing rental property maintenance, but unfortunately used mattresses have 0 scrap value.

Mattresses and couches are a mix of fabric, wood and metal. Most places don't accept them unless you strip them down, which is a PITA (which is precisely why they don't take them).

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

#289

Post by lsllc »

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…

Single stream recycling doesn't mean what you think; trash and recycling mixed and someone magically sorts it all out. It just means the recyclable materials don't need to be separated.

Sadly this is a very common misconception with single stream recycling and leads to significant contamination of the recyclable material [see article!].

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

#290

Post by tomjen3 »

jrib wrote: post #266
icelancer wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recycling is basically fake outside of aluminum (and other metals, and very specific plastics - but those are effectively impossible to sort properly by consumers [0]). [0]: Remember all those codes on the bottom of bottles in the 1990s?

What about glass? I always assumed that was pretty recycling friendly

Clear, maybe. Mixed glass? Unlikely, since who wants weird looking glass?
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