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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

#91

Post by grecy »

ethbro wrote: post #16

Personally, I'm happy that personal recycling hit a bump when China rejected dirty channels. It was marketed in the 80s-00s as more of a panacea than it is, and specifically seems to have inculcated a dangerously willful ignorance of further action. I.e. "I already do the recycling thing, so I do my part." From why I can tell, the toxicity, micro-plastic, and energy concerns are the primary mass-scale benefits? In th…

It always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud they recycle.

Recycling is the worst good thing we should be doing.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order.

I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

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

#92

Post by mschuster91 »

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.

> Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.

Let me guess you're American, where free space is plenty? In most of Europe, space is constrained and about half the EU has banned ordinary landfills for that reason.

Also, landfills are an inherent danger to their surroundings in case the bottom barrier breaks and fluids seep into groundwater or that more-or-less uncontrollable fires break out.

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

#93

Post by javajosh »

grecy wrote: post #91
ethbro wrote: post #16

Personally, I'm happy that personal recycling hit a bump when China rejected dirty channels. It was marketed in the 80s-00s as more of a panacea than it is, and specifically seems to have inculcated a dangerously willful ignorance of further action. I.e. "I already do the recycling thing, so I do my part." From why I can tell, the toxicity, micro-plastic, and energy concerns are the primary mass-scale benefits? In th…

It always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud they recycle. Recycling is the worst good thing we should be doing. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order. I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, although they won't give you your deposit - which seems like a very fair deal to me.

The one odd exception is milk. A classic example of American container reuse, but I don't see any milk sold in glass in Germany.

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

#94

Post by sjwright »

maxerickson wrote: post #49
sjwright wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.

You use that machine on better ore.

Use it on landfill and you get to mine many desirable materials in one place.

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

#95

Post by _Microft »

javajosh wrote: post #93
grecy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud they recycle. Recycling is the worst good thing we should be doing. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order. I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, althou…

Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this:

https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image...

From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

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

#96

Post by iforgotpassword »

jacob019 wrote: post #6
songshuu wrote: post #2

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

Yes. When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the landfill. A properly managed landfill is a perfectly responsible way to dispose of plastic. Get the oil from the ground, make it into useful things, then put it back when we're done.

Maybe I'm just and old gnarly dude, maybe I focus on the bad parts of society too much, but I don't trust the people running these kinds of things enough. At the end of the day it's still capitalism, you might be budget restricted, you want to pay yourself a bigger bonus, whatever. I don't trust that even just the majority of landfills are constructed to contain the waste long enough. And what incentive should you have to build them that way? It's enough if they hold up until you retire from your management position. Maybe if you have some sort of moral values you might think of your grandchildren and add a couple years. But after that, who cares. Long gone, somebody else's problem.

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

#97

Post by iforgotpassword »

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.

If anything, experience from the past gave the people running these things suggestions where they can most likely cut costs without the whole thing blowing up into their faces before they retire. Same with monitoring. It's costly, nothing happened the last couple years, let's just do it less thoroughly.

Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get that shit out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit. Another example? 737 MAX. Yet again a story of a company that kept cutting costs over years and years until it blew up in their faces. It ticked pretty much all the boxes over the year. Cutting corners, saving costs, budget restrictions, ignoring concerns by engineers in charge, you name it.

It's always the same pattern. If Apple doesn't innovate, cheaps out on components, scraps QA, their products might eventually suck so much that nobody will buy them anymore and they'll just disappear, but who cares. Nuclear isn't bad. Aviation isn't bad. Landfills aren't. But these are these kinds of industries where negligence can have catastrophic results. And especially something that is as long term as a landfill is predestined for this kind of failure.

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

#98

Post by javajosh »

_Microft wrote: post #95
javajosh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, althou…

Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this: https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image... From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

Hmm. They don't sell that at Lidl - and are you sure the containers are reused? I don't see the tell-tale scuff ring.

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

#99

Post by stinos »

_Microft wrote: post #95
javajosh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well. In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, althou…

Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this: https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image... From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

This used to exist, and was even fairly common, in many countries. Moreover it was brought to your door by the milkman. And that milkman sometimes also had eggs and even vegetables from local farmers. This disappeared, driven by economics/capitalism/'supermarket=freedom'/..., not because it's bad per se. In fact there's quite some benefits to that whole system from an ecological point of view.

Which leads to sort of funny situations: locally it's been about 20 years since the milkman made his last round. Now there's again a company starting to do a similar thing (bring bottled milk/juice, local farmer's products to your door weekly) and some people who don't know better consider it revolutionary, and the poor company can't keep up with demand :)

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