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

Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 344 posts

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#211

Post by rndgermandude »

grive wrote: post #190
orev wrote: post #13

Landfills are going to become a gold mine when someone finally invents a Wall-E robot. With the advances in AI going on right now, it seems like a feasible thing to happen soon.

This is just so far out. "AI" is currently expert systems and we are seeing its limitations (see setbacks in autonomous driving). It has nowhere near the potential to drive the search and extraction of energy sources in landfills.

To me, the idea of a narrow purpose garbage robot operating in the confines of a landfill sounds more plausible than a self-driving car meant to operate an "open world" scenario populated by other AI and humans alike (aka streets with car, bikes and pedestrians on them). And a lot less dangerous to human life too when they are buggy.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#212

Post by henrikschroder »

greglindahl wrote: post #113
henrikschroder wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sweden incinerates 97% of all its non-recyclable trash, obviously has modern incinerators, and has some oil-powered power plants for peak load purposes.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#213

Post by henrikschroder »

dillonmckay wrote: post #144
henrikschroder wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"paper" is a broad category of garbage. Newspapers are worth recycling, because they can be turned into new newspapers again, removing the ink and the metal can be done fairly efficiently. Cardboard can be recycled fairly efficiently, and can be turned into new cardboard. Plastic-covered/glued/glossy/window envelopes/food containers/other contaminated papers can't be recycled. Just incinerate it, or turn it into pell…

How much energy does it take to recycle newsprint into blank newsprint? What chemicals are involved in that process? Is cardboard similar? Does this take into account the logistics costs?

The alternative to recycling newspaper and cardboard is chopping down forests and turning them into pulp, a process that also needs a lot more logistics, chemicals, energy, and of course forests that you have to re-plant.

Recycling newspaper is a no-brainer from a cost perspective. You can't recycle forever though, each time you lose some wood fibers that are too short and have to be removed from the recycled pulp, so you have to add fresh pulp.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#214

Post by rocgf »

nordsieck wrote: post #150
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…

> Throwing stuff away was the normal way of life before modern civilization arrived What? Absolutely not. Things were precious and labor was cheap back in the day. Anything that could be repaired was. Ever heard of "darning socks"? Yeah - no one would do that today, but it was common 100 years ago. > just like defecating wherever you find convenient Lol. People found out pretty quickly that you have to give a crap ab…

> The earth is big. Really big. Stupendously big.

The earth is big from the perspective of one human, but we are 8 billion. The earth used to be stupendously big, but it is not anymore.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#215

Post by robocat »

noobermin wrote: post #184

Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills. As mentioned elsewhere in this comment s…

> Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it

Ummmm, what is exported is all from the recycling stream. If it wasn't "recycled" it wouldn't get exported, and the importer wouldn't end up disposing of it in the ocean.

I.e. recycling causes more rubbish to end up in the ocean.

AFAIK first world countries are not supposed to export general rubbish, and third world countries are not supposed to import rubbish.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#216

Post by bildung »

noobermin wrote: post #205
bildung wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, PV energy pay back time has been studied to death. See e.g. this presentation from 2012, which says that the whole PV industry is already a net energy producer: https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/symposium2012/MikDale_Symp201... The energy flow is a bit similar to the cash flow of a SAAS company: As ROI takes a few years, the start of the rapidly growing industry looks like a net negative, but with the installe…

So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted. Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electri…

Absolutely, reduction should aways be the first option. Just like electric cars are still just a band aid for unsustainable urban design. The optimum would be more human-centric cities that reduce most needs for powered mobility. I have the luck to be able to live like that and it's just great. School, daycare, shopping and our workplaces are all within a 2km radius. Thus our household doesn't need any car, but everyone has a nice bike to get around. We literally save hours each day that would otherwise be wasted on mobility.

The currently externalized costs of mining the rare materials will for sure be disastrous, but then again they would also be for other types of energy production. Relative to other types of energy production, I think one can more or less ignore this point (unless there is some polluting process involved that only affects a specific mode of energy production).

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#217

Post by bildung »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #210
bildung wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a more generous interpretation of ZeroGravitas' comment: As the bird-and-windmill example shows, those people "worrying" are thought of as denying the fundamental viability of carbon taxes and only use the poor as a popular argument. Worrying about progressive taxation effects is of course very important, but then again also pretty easy to mitigate. And considering the fact that the parties propagating carbon taxe…

There's a fairly large contingent in tech that leans libertarian while also recognizing the impending climate disaster. A climate tax is simply accounting for the externalities of your actions. I wouldn't at all assume that somebody on this site advocating for a carbon tax would take care to not make it regressive, and I think parent's lumping it in with bird strikes (a total red herring considering nobody is talking…

Yes I am not from the US and thus I may be biased by the local political spectrum. Libertarianism is something uniquely US-American, I think. We do have bird strike protesters, though, and they pretty much all are from the right.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#218

Post by pizza234 »

reidacdc wrote: post #105
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…

That's a good point. My analogy was with the typical (software) engineering optimism, however, I've been vary vague.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#219

Post by m0zg »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #186
contactlight11 wrote: post #154

How about this information from CT's DEEP which quotes the EPA for the majority of it's information? Compared to virgin materials, using recycled materials more efficient by: - 40% for paper - 60-74% for steel and tin cans - 33% for plastics - 30% for glass - 5% for aluminum cans These numbers appear to be referencing the generation of new products using recycled vs new materials, but do they fail to take in to accou…

> first step realize that happiness is not automatically linked to consumption I’ve always thought that framing the issue like this is both smug and dishonest. Smug because you’re essentially saying that people are wrong about the things they believe bring them satisfaction and comfort. Dishonest because reduce in this context will always mean a reduction in quality of life. Aside from being an ineffective way to con…

This is a profoundly consumerist point of view, IMO. It presupposes that buying more stuff necessarily brings more satisfaction and comfort (which is not true in general once one's basic needs for security, food, shelter, and healthcare are met), and that having less stuff means "a reduction in quality of life" (also not true, having less stuff leads to an increase in quality of life for many people).

There are demonstrably a lot of unsatisfied, uncomfortable people who have a lot of stuff and whose quality of life is quite poor, all things considered.

Post reply on HN