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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

#81

Post by smu »

dgzl wrote: post #5
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?

Full lifecycle cost... That would make an interesting website.

This book (although a bit older already) attempts to give an overview of the impact of a lot of stuff: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1...

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

#82

Post by xkcd-sucks »

thirstywhimbrel wrote: post #70
randycupertino wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't landfills leech lots of pollutants into the groundwater and nearby environment?

Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study. Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.

Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal

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

#83

Post by abhiyerra »

bobthepanda wrote: post #37
mulmen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

China has a massive pollution problem. If China were to burn all recyclables in a manner consistent with the rest of their industrialization, the process probably wasn’t very clean. China could invest in cleaner recycling processes, but a quick way to reduce a problem is to reduce its scope, and banning imports of recyclable material is certainly a quick way to do that, everyone else be damned. (I don’t really think…

I read in an article a majority of the Pacific Garbage Patch likely comes from this discarded plastic.

Can’t cite at the moment...

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

#84

Post by mirimir »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #80
comicjk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good point.

And I'm reminded of a frightening experience. So I'm home after a night of dancing with friends. And I notice a burn hole in the back of my wool sweater. Some jerk with a lighter, I'm sure. But it could have been very bad, if I had been wearing PET fleece.

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

#85

Post by filesystem »

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.

I don't understand how that is really that easy. I personally don't know of anywhere (at least in the US) that measures the trash output of individual homes. So all existing curbside trash pickup infrastructure would need to be overhauled to implement measurement at the time of collection. Additionally, since trash pickup is handled by municipal / city governments currently, a new system needs to be put in place to provide oversight / enforcement of measurement & fees. The startup cost here would be enormous.

Also, this doesn't even take into account apartment buildings where individuals dump their trash into trash cutes / shared bins / etc. You would essentially need to retrofit every apartment building with a collection system capable of calculating individual output, or charge all residents of each building equally.

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

#86

Post by filesystem »

sjwright wrote: post #75
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True, but the upsides would massively offset the downsides.

Burning trash is an environmental nightmare. https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/html/i...

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

#87

Post by xkcd-sucks »

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?

"When people in the future are so screwed that they'll take whatever they can get, they can..."

Not unlike how people recycle ships and electronics right now

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

#88

Post by usrusr »

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.

Bad idea, because unregulated dumping would still be far too easy to get away with.

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

#89

Post by CogitoCogito »

Shalle135 wrote: post #7
songshuu wrote: post #2

Make hills, heat homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjido

Export it to Sweden https://www.trtworld.com/europe/swedish-recycling-so-success...

That article says that 99% of waste is recycled in Sweden, but also points out that a large part of that is incinerated. I don't really understand how incineration can be called recycling. The cycle literally ends at that point.

That's not to say it's better than many alternatives (the article claims it's better than most landfills), but let's call it what it is.

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

#90

Post by ZeroGravitas »

thirstywhimbrel wrote: post #66
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.4965581 and https://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recyc... A summary from the latter talking specifically about plastic (though the document covers other materials): The results confirm that mechanical recycling is the best waste management option in respect of the climate change potential, depletion of natural resources and energy demand impacts. The analy…

The first link is a "meta-analysis" where they only found three studies on point with wildly different methods that disagreed in their conclusions. One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash. They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three stu…

I think you've misread that, they only found three recent economic analysis of recycling that dealt purely with plastic. (Quite possibly because it makes no sense to set up a recycling system for just one output, since the additional cost once you've started is minimal)

They also found 20 papers that dealt with the climate change emissions and total energy use and ranked them on those factors as well.

The comment I replied to specifically said that we shouldn't worry about landfill space as we have more important issues like climate change, so that's 95% of studies found suggesting that opinion isn't based on facts and that landfill would be a worse option than recycling plastic for greenhouse gas emissions, which we've agreed is a serious problem. (And landfill broadly tied with burning it for energy on greenhouse gas emissions with different assumptions giving different answers).

To your point about total energy use, landfill comes out worst consistently and recycling best.

You could make the leap and assume the process that uses the least energy and releases the least greenhouse gases is also the least expensive economically (if you account for externalities) but that's a bonus on top of providing useful information that could change opinions related to greenhouse gas emissions.

You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts, yet the facts now support their decision, while your stated beliefs about energy usage are contradicted by the science.

Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation? Where does your belief that it was ever considered likely to be a counterproductive activity come from? Did they convince you of anything else, like solar panels not making sense or EVs being worse for the environment, or wind turbines boondoggles? All those were similarly supported by effective government support programs and repaid the investment greatly.

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