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The Recycling Myth

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Re: The Recycling Myth

#31

Post by jkmcf »

marknutter wrote: post #26
wisty wrote: post #15

There's an easy solution. Put a deposit (tax) on bottles, that gets refunded when the bottle gets recycled. If it's worth a 10 cent "sin tax" for me to chuck a Cola bottle away, the that's my choice. If somebody can sort my garbage (because they really need the money, or they have a high-tech robot that can sort trash really well, or whatever else), then they win as well.

Turning an entire nation of people into homeless bottle collectors. Genius. Maybe everyone could get a government issued grocery cart too.

It's done in the US as well, though mostly in the East, I think.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#32

Post by henrikschroder »

marknutter wrote: post #25
proemeth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more economic than politic. The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling. The article suggests that people have to sort their garbage themselves, but they could pay someone to do it for them. This is similar to carbon taxes philosophy, create an incentive by making consumers bear the cost of inefficiencies,…

> The government creates an incentive to sort garbage, which should lead to new businesses creation and better overall management of garbage/recycling. Either way, citizens will be forced to pay these new businesses to do this task, and most will probably still continue to do it themselves to save money. This recycling program is basically a massive tax on the populace, hidden under the guise of environmentalism. Not…

The article is of course exaggerating, noone is forced to do extensive garbage sorting, so paying someone to do it makes absolutely no sense. A lot of people do it because they feel compelled to do "the right thing", others do some sort of best effort, and some ignore it completely.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#33

Post by winthrowe »

marknutter wrote: post #27
henrikschroder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also live in Sweden, and in all the places I've lived, recycling has always been optional. If you don't want to recycle anything, you can just throw everything in the general trash, and noone will know or complain or charge you extra for it. That said, I read an article many years ago by the head of our environmental protection agency, and he rightfully pointed out the externalizing of the cost of sorting on the po…

I've never understood why we recycle glass. It doesn't seem like the materials to make glass are in short supply. Is it just much more costly to gather them new than to melt down existing glass containers?

At least in some areas, the glass can be plainly reused, instead of going through a full recycling process. In Canada, the brown glass beer bottles can be washed and refilled over a dozen times before failing quality checks and needing to be ground and remelted.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#34

Post by lurkinggrue »

m_eiman wrote: post #6

I don't know which part of Sweden the author lives in, but it's apparently not my part. In our trash room here we have bins for glass (white/coloured), paper, batteries and garbage. Card board boxes and other "big" stuff (basically anything that isn't normal consumables) is left at the recycling station (and assuming you do that on your way to work and don't go once per item, the extra energy needed is next to nothin…

There was a definite "OMG the socialism is the evil!" bend to that article. I was almost expecting to read about forced recycling labor camps where they eat babies.

I am not discounting problems in Swedish recycling but the article was a bit over the top.

Re: The Recycling Myth

#35

Post by marknutter »

winthrowe wrote: post #33
marknutter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why we recycle glass. It doesn't seem like the materials to make glass are in short supply. Is it just much more costly to gather them new than to melt down existing glass containers?

At least in some areas, the glass can be plainly reused, instead of going through a full recycling process. In Canada, the brown glass beer bottles can be washed and refilled over a dozen times before failing quality checks and needing to be ground and remelted.

So that's why Canadian beer tastes so terrible :-p

Re: The Recycling Myth

#36

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

nostrademons wrote: post #9
dublinclontarf wrote: post #2

What is being described here is how the Swedish government is externalising costs. Of coarse it looks good, and profitable on paper because most of the costs (and environmental effects) have been put onto the population. As the article mentions this is bad for the environment.

So, there was basically a glaring hole in the logic of the article, and I was wondering if there's anyone else here that can answer it for me.... Garbage is already a big externality. A positive one. The government takes care of hauling away your trash and disposing of it, somewhere, and you get to benefit from the economies of scale of centralizing this. The truly individualist, libertarian thing to do with your gar…

* I think that they'd quickly find out that skipping every other house on the block because they aren't a customer isn't very cost-effective, instead.*

I don't understand why. This is exactly how trash pickup in my area works: there are multiple companies and they only pickup for their own customers. To add insult to injury, I live in a very low-density rural county. Since these guys have been in business for years, I have to assume they're profitable!

Re: The Recycling Myth

#37

Post by xcombinator »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
xcombinator wrote: post #5

Typical american mindset: Everything is money. Use something, throwaway when don't needed, bury it, contaminate the soil, the seas, it's cheaper. Of course they are external cost to recycle, what he doesn't say is that THEY ARE EXTERNAL COST TO NOT RECYCLING. Nature knows that since long long ago, she recycles everything. The Pacific is filled with polymers just because people love to use plastics and don't recycle t…

Fishes dye ? You mean they change colour because they ingest polymers ? Or you mean they die ? My money is on the 'expiry' :) Anyway, you make excellent points, and the article is spouting typical industry grade bs. Resources are finite. A guy called 'Eckart Wintzen' promoted a concept he called 'taxing resources removed', which essentially is the opposite of 'value added tax'. His idea was that you should pay taxes…

Sorry for the typo.

Fishes die everyday because they eat polymers and can't digest it, their stomachs fill and there is no space for food.

It's normal to discover dead sharks and whales with their stomachs filled or nearly filed.

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