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

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

#71

Post by barunio »

mrfusion wrote: post #39
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.

Remember all that same stuff was taken out of the earth at one point.

Actually, no. You might say this about metals, for example, but nature does not produce the sort of high-energy low-information hydrocarbon chains that comprise nearly all plastics. Inserting massive quantities of manmade endocrine disruptors into the earth is massively disruptive.

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

#72

Post by barunio »

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.

You are massively underestimating the environmental impacts. Every form of plastic in widespread use has been found to be a significant endocrine disruptor. The rate of plastic waste has followed an exponential curve similar to emissions. Plastics are likely on the same order of magnitude as climate change and deforestation in terms of the long-term impact on species extinction (and to human health, if that is of greater concern).

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

#73

Post by comicjk »

mirimir wrote: post #44
grogenaut wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there that much need for fleece?

It helps keep me warm in winter. Better than wool, if I get too wet. I just noticed that my wife bought a cute cap, made from recycled soda bottles. Edit: And not just fleece. Also cloth, and yarn for knitted stuff.

A disadvantage: in my experience as a sweaty person, fleece tends to stink after exposure to sweat, while wool resists this more.

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

#74

Post by sjwright »

moosey wrote: post #55
sjwright wrote: post #50

There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%. If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket. And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.

Or the entity that makes the trash should pay for it. That would reduce the amount of packaging that is made by forcing the cost on the producer. If I'm going to be forced to live in a supply side economy, then the supply side should pay the taxes. The same is true for the huge numbers of empty Walmarts throughout the US. We should have made them escrow demolition costs at the time the building was made. If you put t…

Is an aluminium can trash? Or is it highly recyclable material? That’s largely a decision of the consumer, not the manufacturer.

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

#75

Post by sjwright »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #53
sjwright wrote: post #50

There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%. If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket. And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.

Illegal dumping and increased spending on policing would be the result.

True, but the upsides would massively offset the downsides.

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

#76

Post by sjwright »

vorpalhex wrote: post #52
sjwright wrote: post #50

There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%. If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket. And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.

So you want the poor to be gouged?

The economy is already massively skewed against low income people; they’re already “gouged” in a dozen other ways. The solution for that is UBI, not giving up on the environment.

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

#77

Post by mc32 »

Animats wrote: post #38

Automated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as "automated quality control units". The mecha…

It’s the economics.

So they can sort things well. It means they can put them in a dump neatly. Most things that get put into recycling don’t make economic sense to recycle -except aluminum and some other metals.

Most plastics under cheap (but still uneconomic) recycling suffer from heat history and becomes less useful.

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

#78

Post by gamblor956 »

swiley wrote: post #68
xvilka wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is quite interesting Israeli startup Ubq[1] claiming it can recycle [2] greasy plastics into the material usable for further plastics manufacturing. [1] https://www.ubqmaterials.com/ [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/climate-solutio...

It’s not hard to come up with a process that can recycle anything organic into any petrochemical via Fischer Tropsch. What’s difficult is doing it economically.

They claim to be able to do it economically.

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

#79

Post by bamboozled »

mirimir wrote: post #65
bamboozled wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to watch out for is what happens to this stuff when you wash it. Yes it contaminates the environment with micro plastics. One solution is to use a special bag to capture and filter them out. [1] [1] https://en.guppyfriend.com/

Oops. Damn. But that's an issue with all synthetic clothing, right? I guess that making bottles and sheeting would be best.

I think nylon jackets etc are ok, like the hard shell ski jackets etc. It’s more just and issue with soft fleece type stuff I believe.

Patagonia has some information about it on their site somewhere, they also stock the guppy friend bags.

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

#80

Post by xkcd-sucks »

comicjk wrote: post #73
mirimir wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps keep me warm in winter. Better than wool, if I get too wet. I just noticed that my wife bought a cute cap, made from recycled soda bottles. Edit: And not just fleece. Also cloth, and yarn for knitted stuff.

A disadvantage: in my experience as a sweaty person, fleece tends to stink after exposure to sweat, while wool resists this more.

Also wool is somewhat flame resistant while synthetic fleece melts to your skin and catches on fire
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