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When I first heard that in the US they just throw all "recycling" in the same bin it sounded insane. I'm used to sorting into colored glass, clear glass, paper, cardboard, metal, compost, batteries, plastic and "general". I'm pretty sure the metal and plastic (if it actually is ever recycled) categories could benefit from better segmentation too.
When I first heard that in the US they just throw all "recycling" in the same bin it sounded insane. I'm used to sorting into colored glass, clear glass, paper, cardboard, metal, compost, batteries, plastic and "general". I'm pretty sure the metal and plastic (if it actually is ever recycled) categories could benefit from better segmentation too.
Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical conductivity. Batteries are considered hazardous waste and have to be disposed of separately, similarly for old electronics or CFL bulbs that contain mercury. But commingled recycling was one of the most predictably stupid moves in the area of environmentalism I've seen in a long time (well, prior to 2016 anyway), when I heard my city was moving…
Yeah, what I meant by better segmentation is not to separate them from each other (we do that) but rather by type. Some plastics are easier to recycle than others and I don't know if metals can be easily and automatically sorted from each other.
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I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too, since that can be easily separated from the waste stream magnetically. Glass, I don't think makes sense, except for downcycling to aggregate.
> I'm pretty sure iron/steel recycling makes sense too Oh, sure, forgot that. Though steel and iron are not that common in household waste where I'm from. I specifically point to glass reuse rather than glass recycling . As soon as you have to process glass, the energy costs are massive.
Also we've all heard stories of, let's call it aggressive proactive copper recycling.
It is always a little surprising how naive people are when it comes to recycling. The majority of the cost and difficulty comes in sorting. Back in the good old days most US municipalities used to require people to sort their recycling by type, but over the years we have switched to a more wasteful system. For aluminum cans the material is valuable and relatively easy to sort. For plastic the material is cheap and so…
If cost of recycling is high, what is the benefit? It's not significantly reduced carbon emissions (a person's average annual plastic usage is priced at only tens of dollars worth of carbon emissions under a system like the EU ETS), and in the US it's not land shortage (an order of magnitude more land is used by golf corses than landfills), and modern landfills don't pollute the surrounding environment.
The other hack is that the cost of trash disposal is artificially depressed to reduce the incentive to dispose of refuse by illegal dumping. But this means refuse is overproduced.
Recycling is an attempt to reduce this increased volume of refuse going into landfills.
The better strategy would be to charge a fee, up front, for all goods that reflects their cost of disposal. This would be used to subsidize disposal in whatever way was most economical (recycling, landfilling, incineration). It would discourage overpackaging and encourage products that were easier to dispose of.
Great. Can we also discuss now how recycling paper hurts climate? Modern landfills are airtight, so buried paper is sequestered carbon. Less buried paper - less sequestration.
Who cares? Burn the plastic trash! You get the plastic item use out of it, and you get almost all the energy from it as if you had burned the oil directly.
I think that will require a large number of new technologies to make such burning environmentally sustainable and cost competitive with other energy producing technologies. I don’t have enough science, engineering, or economic knowledge to even take a wild guess at the feasibility of such technology. Maybe that would be a better challenge for Mr. Musk and various other privateers and governments than running away to…
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Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.
Aren't we running out of sand too? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
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If consumers were compensated for recycling materials they would be much more inclined to sort properly. Recycling centers that take materials that cost too much to recycle likely have a government contract to "take care of it". They dont have a lot of incentive to be efficient. They get paid to make it disappear.
I don't know about where you live, but in California, we have a "bottle deposit" on both glass bottles and aluminum cans (~$0.10 per item), which gets returned to you if you bring it to a recycling center. The only people I see actually bothering to sort and return these are very low income people and homeless people that go through public trash cans.
Plenty of cans are collected by homeless / lowest income people, but it's also just about enough that average people will collect them too.
If I have a huge bag after a party, I return them. When I normally only have 0-2 bottles in a typical week, I take them outside and put them on the little shelf on the bin for someone to collect without needing to rummage: https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/style...
New food packaging can only use recycled material collected in this way. The general household recycling is considered too dirty.
I have difficulties to understand if that's US specific or also a problem in Europe and the rest of the world. For example, I'm reading this article from 2011 that mentions that 77% of Japan's plastic is recycled: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/japan-le... Is that complete bullshit too, or is something possible to actually achieve, just not in the US?
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Aren't we running out of sand too? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
Concrete requires river sand because of its texture. AFAIK, desert sand is quite abundant and perfectly suited to being melted down into glass.
Through quartz sand is still widely available.
The reason we recycle glass bottles is that it's much more energy efficient to create new glass from recycled glass and it's not to hard to sort/separate glass so recycling glass makes sense for reasons which are unrelated to how "rare" the resource it's made from is.
Note that this is only true for glass bottles (or similar), things like window glass is made from different sand mixes and should not be placed into the glass recycling bin at all.
I have no idea if you can recycle window glass (as e.g. non window glass) or similar. But it's not part of the glass bottle recycling process and is seen as a form of contamination if placed in to large amounts in the recycling glass. (as far as I remember)
