111–120 of 344 posts
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.
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I fully share this cynicism about recycling things that are not aluminum or glass. It also seems that by making people feel better about generating nominally recyclable waste they are encouraged to consume more. I am at least familiar with arguments against US-style airport security and donating cans of food, but whats wrong with hybrid cars? I don't know of any arguments that they are net neutral / harmful.
Lithium battery production is extremely harmful to the environment.
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There's problems and solutions that need policy and political will to implement: - consumer-sorted recycling is a BandAid virtue-signal and ineffective because it gets mixed up, under-sorted and contaminated - post-consumer waste-stream separation works. Stanford does it because five bins was ridiculous - all trash should be recycled, composted at-scale to reach near zero landfill stream - Structural waste reduction…
Single-use plastics are perfectly fine if: 1) You already have oil-powered power plants, and 2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and 3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated. Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up bur…
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…
If there's food/greade on the item that can't be removed for one reason or another toss it, it can't be recycled efficiently. There solved your moral dilemma. Generally only clean paper, glass, and metal are recyclable. Plastics depend entirely on the locality and still require it to be clean. Also I work at a food pantry. Donations of canned goods are always welcome, same for razors, toiletries, etc. Anything that c…
Recycling has built up such inertia as the "moral" path, regardless of its inefficiencies for most materials, that it's become an unsustainable clusterfuck that we can't move away.
Where I live, it's been codified- municipalities must recycle, and also must discourage landfill-bound waste. The result is that I've been issued a 64-gallon mixed-recycling bin that is picked up once a week, and a small 36-gallon trash can that's picked up every two weeks. There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful- not as some kind of environmental whatever, but it's just in our moral framework. A 36-gallon trash can holds about 2.5 full kitchen garbage bags in it, so if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup (reducing our available volume for that period then). Anything out there then sits in the sun for 2 weeks stinking and attracting raccoons/rodents until the next pickup.
The result? Anything remotely resembling "recyclable" gets tossed in the recycling bin. Food/grease on it? Put it in the bin. You know where the stuff in that bin goes now? It goes to the recycling facilities and then sits there in huge piles because no one will buy it anymore because the whole system was propped up on bullshit the entire time.
To top all that off, the law also prevents these now-inundated recycling facilities from moving their material to a landfill for proper disposal. So it literally just sits there and we have absolutely no solution for it. It would be political suicide to advocate the loosening of recycling laws, no matter how broken they are, so you'll never have a representatives willing to fix this problem.
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The UK is banning straws but will still allow people to buy straws from pharmacies. That seems like a good balance. Our local high street only allow disabled drivers to park. So the 'pedestrianised' high street is full of the cars of disabled drivers. That doesn't seem to be such a good balance. Ps I feel there's a good rhyme hiding somewhere with your straw man straw ban.
What's wrong with handicap parking? Is it being abused?
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 re…
Are you saying that's what corporations should morally do, or that that's what they should logically do to increase profits? It could be that a corporation saying "buy our stuff then recycle it" causes more people to buy the stuff than saying "buy our stuff then throw it away". In that situation, a profit motivated corporation would promote recycling even if it hurts the environment.
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…
It seems like compostable containers might be more practical, since the food and container go into the same bin?
I’m confused by these new plastic bag rules in some cities. What is the underlying reasoning that was used to advocate for them?
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Single-use plastics are perfectly fine if: 1) You already have oil-powered power plants, and 2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and 3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated. Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up bur…
Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3.
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 re…
Are there many known examples of this? Kinda curious about what shape this problem takes in context