161–170 of 241 posts
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?
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…
"There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out."
Asking the consumer to sort out hundreds of different plastic types -- to then be picked up by a truck that has hundreds of compartments to keep them separate somehow? Or dropped off at a facility with hundreds of labelled bins? -- does not seem any more feasible than having a "single-stream" sorting facility do it.
Other kinds of recycling, that aren't plastic, are somewhat more feasible than plastic, even if not currently economically profitable. Plastic recycling particularly, according to the info in the article which matches other things I've learned, is just pretty much imaginary.
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A jump from coal straight to nuclear and renewables would have been possible. That said, there are an innumerable number of side effects from cheap fossil fuels that would change present reality as we know it were they removed. Removing cheap fossil fuel energy could have drastically slowed down emigration from cities to the burbs, so it’s also fun to imagine a different present where there’s dozens of New York Citie…
It’s weird to think if we hadn’t had fossil fuels at all how badly it would have hampered human development. Could we have even got to modern development level without so much free power? It doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps the challenge would have forced us to come up with more imaginative solutions - I mean there’s oceans full of hydrogen for starters. And the sun would still be shining and the oceans still full of wav…
It's only free if you don't consider externalities to be a cost.
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Same in Japan.
On the other hand, packaging (and thus plastic waste) in Japan is next-level ridiculous. A fancier food present will be often wrapped in at least 3 layers, and I've counted u to 5: bag, present paper, normal box, group package, individual package.
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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…
> a paper envelope or cardboard is way better than a plastic one, even if it's bigger/heavier. 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.
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.
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Why? Separation actually works pretty well, I'm not sure why we need to "fix" that. What doesn't is people still leave food in things and don't do basic things like not throw in little bits of plastic like straws.
Separation is another step that needs to be taken somewhere else if not done by the consumer. The person throwing out garbage is the person responsible for the garbage and also the person that has the item in it's hand so they are both the best suited to sort it and the person that we should incentivize to do it.
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It’s weird to think if we hadn’t had fossil fuels at all how badly it would have hampered human development. Could we have even got to modern development level without so much free power? It doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps the challenge would have forced us to come up with more imaginative solutions - I mean there’s oceans full of hydrogen for starters. And the sun would still be shining and the oceans still full of wav…
> Could we have even got to modern development level without so much free power? It's only free if you don't consider externalities to be a cost.
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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…
> Metal and plastic are super easy to separate by density or by electrical conductivity 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 get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass. These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed. It might just be that burying it in the gr…
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.