Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated • Hacker News Board

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#101

Post by lmm » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

harimau777 wrote: post #56

Liron wrote: post #30

We really shot ourselves in the foot with this whole pointless "recycling paper and plastic" thing huh? The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization and one of life's little pleasures, and we had to ruin it by acting like it's wrong when it's actually not. When I walk up to some wastebins holding a papery-plasticky object with a bit of food stuck to it, my heart sinks. Now I have to…

So is recycling plastic and paper not effective? I have some anxiety issue and one of the ways that they manifest is obsessing about recycling so not having to worry about plastic and paper would be a huge improvement in my quality of life. Edit: I should clarify, I realize that the article is saying that recycling plastic and paper isn't worth it, but is that a mainstream opinion?

Article wasn't a surprise, so yes, I think it's pretty mainstream. Definitely recycle aluminium (very energy-intensive to extract), probably recycle glass and other metals, don't worry about anything else.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#102

Post by balfirevic » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

SamPatt wrote: post #87

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strangely mainstream in American libertarian circles (and therefore places like HN), but even they seem to spend most of their time railing against the sheep-like masses who have been hoodwinked so I guess even that is a tacit admission that it's not mainstream. The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad. On the other hand, her…

The first two citations are NPR. Not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.

And neither is HN for that matter.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#103

Post by shkkmo » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:00 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #54

Reducing is strategic. Reusing and recycling are tactical. If your strategy is in place, use all the tactics that contribute to it. But if you don't have your strategy in place, tactics can do nothing or even move you backward. Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction. We are stepping on the gas, thinking we're stepping on the brake. Covered in episode 183 of Leadership and…

> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction.

I don't think this is strictly true. It certainly is not the explanation for why we have most of the recycling programs we do have.

Overpaying for unnecessary recycling reduces growth. Economically efficient recycling increases it.

Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling.

There may be some methods of recycling that are environmentally efficient but economically inefficient, but that would be due to externalities that need to be regulated anyway.

The issue of expecting and engineering unending growth is an interesting topic but doesn't really have anything to do with this article.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#104

Post by signal_space » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #28

pier25 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recycling consumes energy. The better strategy is by far designing products that last longer or can be reused.

There's a reason that Recycle comes last in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle": it's the least desirable option. If you Reduce, you get an easy win by not needing the resource in the first place; Reuse achieves orders of magnitude of efficiency in the resource's utility (a glass mason jar can be used thousands of times, compared to a plastic one designed to used once and disposed). Recycling is often fraught with inefficiencie…

The issues with mason jars and ceramic cup ends up being the amount of energy required to fire the oven. This ends up putting you in a deep hole when it comes to accounting energy inputs, as consumer plastics are essentially repurposed refinery waste.

This leaves you with the choice to either spend a lot of energy or risk environmental contamination. Chemical accounting ends up being a nontrivial problem to address.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#105

Post by reidacdc » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:17 PM UTC

pizza234 wrote: post #15

> Properly run landfill doesn’t hurt the environment in itself. ... and properly written software has no security vulnerabilities.

This one caught my eye also.

I think the software analogy is not especially good, but it feels like there's some poorly-aligned incentives in landfill engineering. The point of landfills is to make trash invisible, so saving money by hiding engineering faults in the landfill itself is easy, they get buried along with the trash, and by the time the leakage becomes noticeable, the builder is long gone (bankrupt, merged/acquired, whatever), and the community is left to spend more on remediation than would have been required for prevention.

The solution to this sort of problem is generally regulation and oversight. I try not to be cynical about the utility of that approach, but it's hard.

The difference from software engineering is that, for landfills, the specifications don't change on the fly, and the engineering best-practices to build them actually exist.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#106

Post by smileysteve » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

pizza234 wrote: post #15

> Properly run landfill doesn’t hurt the environment in itself. ... and properly written software has no security vulnerabilities.

This also stood out to me, as I've become increasingly aware that most of the landfills around me are not lined.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#107

Post by bdamm » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

daxfohl wrote: post #75

yongjik wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The convenience of throwing something away is a triumph of modern civilization ... I think you got it backwards. Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived, just like defecating wherever you find convenient, hunting animals for dinner, or riding hoses on whatever side of road you like. The wonder of modern civilization gave us so much power to produce stuff that it's no longer…

Even in old times it may be less true than you'd think. I was recently reading one of the Little House books to my kid and there's few sentences in there in their move to the west, how Ma cleaned up their lunch scraps and packing them along when on the pioneer trail in the middle of otherwise nowhere in their journey across the Dakotas.

Food for the chickens, perhaps?

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#108

Post by blunte » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #95

Eventually, robots will go through all of the landfills and recover a lot of the materials in it. And they might get all the energy they need to do it from the garbage itself. Hey, if insects can do it, robots will eventually be able to do it.

By then, there won't be any insects...

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#109

Post by bdamm » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

Liron wrote: post #43

Skunkleton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea was that hybrid cars are a sort of local maxima that has stalled real progress (alternative energy cars).

Yeah, hybrid cars might be called a "local maximum"... at best. "Local" because they were always predictably a technological dead end. "Maximum" because they maybe gave us a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, although gas-efficient internal combustion engine cars may have been the more energy-efficient option all along when you consider the up-front cost and maintenance complexity of hybrid cars' dual engines. Th…

Toyota was selling mass-produced plug-in "hybrids" and Nissan was selling 100mi range 100% electric Leafs before Tesla had even produced the Model S. Yes, Tesla made them sexy, but Toyota, Nissan, and even Ford & GM did the very early path-finding that I think we needed in order to move ahead with the technology and get to the point where people would feel comfortable considering them at all.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#110

Post by smileysteve » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 11:50 PM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #96

gruez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when you really go shopping you should and can easily bring a bag when you go shopping. There's a Danish study[1] that concluded that reusable bags require 50+ uses before breaking even with disposable plastic bags. And that's for one use. If you reuse the disposable bag once (to line your garbage bin, for example), the break even point is now 100+ uses. If you factor in cleaning costs for the reusable bags, I'd be…

That study only looked at resource usage, and not the consequences of carelessly discarded shopping bags clogging up rivers and beaches. The best shopping bag to use is still an upcycled bag made from otherwise discarded material, as you are not creating demand for the production of new bags. Sail cloth is a good sturdy fabric, and a bag made from it will literally last you a lifetime.

Brag, I've been reusing the same backpack from high school for over a decade. It carries about 30l or 16lbs of fluids, I've had the zippers repaired once, and I probably use it at least one a week.