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

Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 154 posts

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#21

Post by aazaa »

> As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89% since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to all countries were down 64% in that time period, while mixed paper exports were down 42% according to ISRI.

The article doesn't clearly explain why the shift has happened. It does point out:

> ... China ... wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard.

And later:

> China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable junk stateside.

Have wages in China really risen so quickly that human garbage sorters are now too expensive? That seems unlikely, and the article gives no evidence for it.

An alternative explanation might be that the plastic was never recycled in the first place. It's more than just sorting. Each container has a residue of liquid/solid stuff that can't possibly be compatible with low-cost material recycling.

What if the material received by China was actually burned instead to generate energy rather than new containers? That might explain the newfound reluctance of China to take the stuff.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#22

Post by ZeroGravitas »

lacker wrote: post #8
pythux wrote: post #4

This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?

The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

A meta study of papers doing lifecycle cost analysis of the options shows that on several metrics, including climate change reduction, landfill is worse than both incineration and recycling for a broad range of materials. This is why almost every functional government in the world legislates accordingly.

This is partly due to the energy cost of new vs recycled so somewhat ironically landfill becomes a slightly better option as the grid becomes more renewable, though unlikely to pull ahead of recycling, since it also takes energy that would be getting cleaner.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#23

Post by dig1 »

lacker wrote: post #8
pythux wrote: post #4

This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?

The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

I'm not sure are you serious about not seeing landfill connection with environmental problems or just being sarcastic.

If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;)

These days there is more trust in corrupted media than plain logic.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#24

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Retric wrote: post #17
noisem4ker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think that filling the earth with trash is not the correct solution to the problem, however convenient it may be.

Landfills replacement a tiny volume and can be mined long term. It’s mostly organic matter that’s going to turn into coal and oil eventually but there plenty of more useful elements like copper in the mix.

I'm continually amazed at how popular the concept of mining landfills for resources is in this forum, while at the same time recycling is regularly dismissed as wishful thinking.

Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#25

Post by maxerickson »

dig1 wrote: post #23
lacker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

I'm not sure are you serious about not seeing landfill connection with environmental problems or just being sarcastic. If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;) These days there is more…

For a long time it was because China was buying it.

Here the landfill has recycling sorting on site and puts glass in the landfill because no one will pay what it costs to ship it.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#26

Post by maxerickson »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #24
Retric wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landfills replacement a tiny volume and can be mined long term. It’s mostly organic matter that’s going to turn into coal and oil eventually but there plenty of more useful elements like copper in the mix.

I'm continually amazed at how popular the concept of mining landfills for resources is in this forum, while at the same time recycling is regularly dismissed as wishful thinking. Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?

It's super duper shitty ore, basically useless.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#27

Post by ars »

dig1 wrote: post #23
lacker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

I'm not sure are you serious about not seeing landfill connection with environmental problems or just being sarcastic. If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;) These days there is more…

Your information is incorrect. No countries are exporting junk, rather some countries buy recycling in order to profitably use it.

And those developed countries were willing to sell it.

And yes those developed countries do in fact have landfills and they use them. there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#28

Post by electricslpnsld »

lacker wrote: post #8
pythux wrote: post #4

This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?

The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic. The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

> The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.

The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#29

Post by mirimir »

Damn, I hate those two paragraph articles. Damn lazy writers.

Edit: This is all that Firefox Reader View shows. No explanation. Just this:

> Recycling Rethink: What to Do With Trash Now That China Won’t Take It

> Saabira Chaudhuri

> 1 minute

> For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.

> That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and...

Another edit: I would subscribe, if I could. I mean, just 1 EUR per quarter. But they want a credit card, and Mirimir has no credit cards. And expecting me to trust their discretion, if I shared my meatspace identity, would be foolish. But even trying for anonymous credit cards violates KYC law, and isn't worth the risk just to read WSJ.

Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

#30

Post by mulmen »

aazaa wrote: post #21

> As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89% since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to all countries were down 64% in that time period, while mixed paper exports were down 42% according to ISRI. The article doesn't…

Are you suggesting China was just burning all the recyclables? If so why did they stop?
Post reply on HN