Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
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Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#2Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#3As far as I can understand it, the recycling industry is a well-intentioned waste of resources. It would be much better for the environment for all this waste to be sequestered in a landfill than for people to pay to ship it around the world only for most of it to be dumped or rejected (which, even when the Asian countries in question do accept it, they are likely to do anyway). These materials (plastics) are so cheap to produce that it will probably never be economical to recycle them, unless recycling them entails cleaning them and reusing them in their original state.
I think a lot of people have undeservedly negative emotional reactions to the concept of sending waste to landfills. Waste in landfills is waste that won't find its way into the rest of the environment. Plastic not decomposing is bad in that it ties up resources for a very long time, but it's good in that it doesn't even produce methane waste in landfills. And I'm guessing it takes less CO2 to ship X kilos of plastic around the world and reprocess it than to dispose of the plastic close to its source and produce X new kilos of plastic.
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#4Why can't the US develop domestic waste-processing capabilities? We could be generating power from incineration plants.
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#5Replace with glass and aluminum, with what's left over burn it. That way it has no way of creating any other problems in the future. If you are efficient with burning it you could even capture the greenhouse gasses produced as a result and sequester those.
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#6This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It's simple, fun, and environmentally friendly. Why don't we do this with... milk, juice, etc.? Why not do this with everything really?
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#7Good for them - until recently it had never occurred to me that many “recycling” programs were just “send it to another country”.
It wasn’t until someone on HN pointed out to me that even most plastic “recycling” is just shredding and using for things like carpet.
The long term solution seems to replace most plastics with paper/cardboard and actually compostable materials (which doesn’t really include the compostable plastics)
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#8This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…
Plastic is cheaper and doesn’t shatter. Some states in the US still have the refund thing for bottles. I’ve seen a vending machine in NYC for bottle refunds and one in Munich, Germany.
When I was in Central America they wouldn’t let you leave the store with the bottle. They would provide a plastic bag where you could sip the coke out with a straw.
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#9Why can't the US develop domestic waste-processing capabilities? We could be generating power from incineration plants.
It was cheaper to send it overseas rather than to invest in alternative technologies. So if any company tries to develop some technology, they might not get funding. Imagine if gasoline was 10x cheaper how much it would slow down development of electric cars.
Re: Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste
#10This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It'…
They're heavier.