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What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

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Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#51

Post by throwitaway222 »

sceptic123 wrote: post #43
throwitaway222 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of this comment thinks everyone is like him or her.

the author of the article does the same

Maybe but there are different things going on: The author of the article suggests that many people are advocating different things, and is trying to present evidence to convince people. The commenter simply says "problem solved" because reuse is possible and everyone is already doing it. But that's just not the truth.

Engineers are often the worst at human understanding. They may understand systems and solutions, but they don't understand people. And often what is needed is to advertise to people the thing they ought to do - so they can come up to the level of the engineer's understanding of said thing. Then the engineer also says Advertising is Bad.

Fun paradoxical world we live in.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#52

Post by megagpt5 »

prmoustache wrote: post #20
swinnipeg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wager the median number of uses per cotton bag is way below 173 store visits.

Why would it be that low? I am using 3 if them that are around a decade old.

The average cotton bag has an artificially low number by misleading statistics. Alice uses one bag 100 times, Bob uses 99 bags one time each. If you sample a grocery purchase and check how many times that bag is used in its lifetime it is 50.5 on average. But if you sample a bag and check how many times it is used in its lifetime, it is 2.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#53

Post by Yizahi »

leonixyz wrote: post #3

The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!

Do you realize that plastic bags can be reused too? Some of my plastic bags are clocking up to 10 years now with semi-regular use. My first ever shopper is plastic one and it's closing on two decades of regular use. I also reuse thin single use bags, sometimes multiple times if they hold up. E.g. a single use plastic bag I use for my swimming pool slipper had been reused dozens of times by now, just fine. I also have reusable cotton bags too, I only discard bags if they fail completely, regardless of material or construction.

Point is - blindly assigning black and white, all or nothing labels to generic materials is not smart. And the total lifetime environment harm of each product is not so clear cut as both radical greens and CC deniers try to push on us.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#54

Post by xboxnolifes »

mingus88 wrote: post #47
rendang wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I remember to take mine maybe 25% of the time

Yeah they need to stay in the car. It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading. We actually just get paper bags and reuse them for our recycling items. The paper bag goes into the recycling bin with the rest of the paper. I actually don’t care if recycling takes more energy. We should save plastics for where they can be best used, and that’s not a one-shot…

> It’s a hard habit to break because we have lived our entire lives bringing the groceries in and unloading.

So... how are you bringing in the groceries? Making 10 trips stacking things in your hands?

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#55

Post by xboxnolifes »

hansvm wrote: post #14
swinnipeg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wager the median number of uses per cotton bag is way below 173 store visits.

I bet you're right. Why though? I've gotten thousands of uses out of mine. Even if you shop infrequently that just means they'll wear out more slowly, so surely that's viable for everyone else, maybe with a 7yr break-even point for an every-2-week shopper?

Because people forget their bags sometimes, and now they have 2 more they they need to use every week for 3 years to break even, on top of their previous bags. Because people take home leftovers from restaurants and the restaurant sometimes puts them into reusable bags, but you already have 10 reusable bags at home so it's not like getting another is helping. Because you get takeout or delivery once in a while and the food comes in a reusable bag that you are never going to reuse 100 times, because you already have 20 reusable bags from forgetting them while grocery shopping and taking home leftovers.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#56

Post by grebc »

sustainalady wrote: post #44

As someone who works in sustainability, and life cycle analysis, it's quite frustrating to see someone who is clearly not technically trained lay out an argument for single-use based on LCA data. Establishing a functional unit is critical for this type of analysis, otherwise yeah, it looks like every single-use item is "more sustainable" than a reusable. That isn't actually how you measure a sustainability scenario i…

Want to get people onboard? Make it cheaper to reuse/recycle.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#57

Post by ch4s3 »

natex wrote: post #38

This author does what other pro-industry mouthpieces do: 1. Reference a real scientific study with a genuine but conditional result, 2. Remove the qualifications associated with the study, so they can 3. Make a much stronger rhetorical conclusion. Or they simply willfully misreport the results.It's exhausting exercise to have to continuously fact-check these shills. Here's just one example from the article: "Approxim…

I think their use of that paper is a bit sloppy, but you're sort of doing a similar thing by making a strong rhetorical claim "This author does what other pro-industry mouthpieces do" while ignoring the point of the paragraph, "Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean", which is broadly true[1]. North America and Europe account for 5.1% or ocean plastic. India alone accounts for nearly 13%, and the Philippines nearly 37%.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#58

Post by grebc »

Yizahi wrote: post #50

The language gives off some climate denialist vibes, but the substance is nonetheless true - recycling become both a magical word which is forbidden to be challenged on merit, and it also become a crude hammer to just bash peons to distract from real problems and real solutions. I also appreciate that finally someone says that DAC should happen as a more effective climate change tool. Lately I'm getting a feel that i…

It’s religion in the making.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#59

Post by grebc »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #13

A question I've often wondered: is the "cost" of bad recycling higher or lower than the cost of not recycling? We've moved a few times over the years and it's often surprising what is and isn't recyclable in different jurisdictions. This means I often find myself putting something into the recycle that isn't recyclable in my current jurisdiction. Is this worse than just not recycling, let's say on a per unit basis? I…

I’ve moved around a lot in Australia, every local government is responsible for the waste/recycling of the area it governs. Even neighbouring local governments have different waste and/or recycling.

The last place I lived before moving 2 months ago, didn’t have recycling bin at all. A unit complex with only one big waste bin. So nice not having to think which bin does this go in.

Re: What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

#60

Post by phatskat »

coredog64 wrote: post #40
abirch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the microplastics. Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.

> Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs. As opposed to ceramic mugs that just materialize in your house? Not sure about you, but I don't have a dilithium powered transporter in my kitchen.

I have a handful of mugs that I've had for decades at this point, a couple even from my parents kitchen that they used some 30 years and probably before then.

And then there's thrift store mugs - sure they were almost certainly trucked to _somewhere_ a long time ago.

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