131–140 of 241 posts
If you go to Switzerland it opens your eyes a bit - there's no plastic recycling, there's only PET plastic recycling. If the bottle/whatever is not PET, it's not recycleble and you have to buy special, taxed bag that's used for "everything else" that gets burned/whatever. PET plastic can be recycled to lower grade plastic used for outdoor mats etc.
Reduce, reuse, recycle - meaning recycling is the last option. It's better to not consume plastic in the first place, but if you must, find additional uses for it. It takes more of a lifestyle change though than to simply put your cans in a different barrel. Which is probably why few people are willing to try it.
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I live in an apartment complex, so we have different receptacles for each. But for single-family homes there are usually segmented so you have different subsections for each like this: https://www.rambo.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/fyrfackskrl-... When I lived in my last apartment I carried the glass/plastic/paper/cardboard and so on a block over to a public recycling station, so that was a lot less convenient but I…
What does the emptying collection process look like for one of those barrels? I can only assume someone comes by, manually opens the lid and by hand takes out each of the smaller containers one by one, and empties them into larger segregated collection containers. Is that true?
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.
isn't sequestering carbon a good thing?
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Recycling is a hack to try to fix the downside of another hack. 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 thei…
A fee up-front like _taxes_ (VAT)? It is the government that subsidizes the disposal, and does it through the taxes that they charge everyone, so in fact exactly what you are saying it's happening. If the tax depended on e.g. volume of packaging vs volume of content, or weight of packaging vs weight of content, that might be a different story and more useful. But even then not all trash is done equal, a paper envelop…
Why is it better? Because the plastic comes from fossil fuels that cause CO2 emissions? The solution there is a CO2 tax on fossil fuels, not trying to special case the waste disposal fee.
I'm sick of stupid people. This was never a secret. If you were dumb enough to think recycling works for anything other than aluminium you are the problem. Penn and Tell even did a Bullshit, for pre internet times. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/ ( although it was a awful episode )
People have to work and raise their children. They can't be expected to be experts on things that the government, media, and scientists are actively trying to deceive them about.
It’s pretty crazy that they can’t sort black plastic because the machine relies on IR light to sense plastic type. We’ve got all these machine learning engineers in the area and probably not so many of them are working on real practical solutions to problems like trash sorting.
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Aren't we running out of sand too? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
We’re running out of beach and construction sand, which needs to be somewhat coarse to be functional. Desert sand particles are too fine, alkali content is too high, and is generally full of contaminants.
There's the documentary Sand Wars that highlights the issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Wars
Al Jazeera aired a docu about it too (don't know if it was the same one): https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2017/12/s...
Um, what's the deal with editing the headline? The original asserts a statement. It may or may not be true. But why would it benefit HN readers to turn this assertion into a question?
Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted Recycling To Sell More Plastic : NPR
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…
Why are we always blaming the public for being easily deceived and not the people who invest large sums of financial and political capital in the deception?