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As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

nytimes.com

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Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#111

Post by majewsky »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #9
SamReidHughes wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would create infinite other forms of garbage that people throw in the trash anyway.

I'm no packaging expert, however we did innovate ourselves in to this mess, it seems reasonable we may be able to innovate ourselves out of it.

Is that anything more than a sentiment? It's easy to come up with counter-examples. For example, it's easy for me to "innovate" myself into a 15-foot hole in the ground, and likely impossible to innovate myself out of it without outside help.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#112

Post by scrollaway »

ish wrote: post #62
dredmorbius wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order of priority: 1. Reduce. 2. Reuse. 3. Recycle.

I hope you don't mind if I add to your list -- I like the 5 R's: 1. Refuse 2. Reduce 3. Reuse 4. Repurpose 5. Recycle Arguably Refuse and Repurpose are derivative, but I still like calling them out.

The "Three R's" have been a thing forever. https://home.fandom.com/wiki/Reduce,_reuse,_recycle

"Refuse" sounds like you're just repeating the point of Reduce (=> Reduce consumption). And "Repurpose" is exactly the same as "Reuse".

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#113

Post by LorenPechtel »

username223 wrote: post #56
nostrademons wrote: post #18

It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…

There was, and still is, actual recycling. I remember taking the (sorted) recyclables to a recycling business, which paid by the pound. I remember watching the homeless guys in LA pick aluminum cans out of the blue bins early in the morning on trash day, presumably for the money. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the single-stream version were largely marketing (by weight). WM or whichever company picks out a few…

Yup. Metals are actually worth recycling. Little else is.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#114

Post by selimthegrim »

rdtsc wrote: post #61
SiempreViernes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, the environment gets ruined so it's more of a "everyone suffers and die ahead of time" situation

That's why I called it a "a dystopian win-win" :-)

Recyclables, Please! Steam greenlight that stat. I’d buy it. Maybe the plot twist is you’re homeless all along!

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#115

Post by the8472 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #12

In Germany you pay a deposit when you buy a bottle and when you bring it back, you get your money back. At least when I lived there the system worked well. there is always a lot of pressure from industry to go one-way though.

It's not just bottles. Manufacturers must register packaging materials they use on their products with a central register and pay fees for all the packages they produce. Since january 2019 a revised form of the law is in force which also applies to packages used by online distributors, e.g. amazon has to pay fees for the cardboard packages it wraps around the manufacturer's pre-existing packaging for which the latter has already paid.

There also are mandatory recycling quotas.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#116

Post by ngold »

damoe wrote: post #75
maxxxxx wrote: post #12

In Germany you pay a deposit when you buy a bottle and when you bring it back, you get your money back. At least when I lived there the system worked well. there is always a lot of pressure from industry to go one-way though.

I was a kid in Oregon in the early 70's when they implemented a bottle deposit. It was $.05 then which would be $.30 today. To bad they haven't increased the deposit amount. You also could return older, non-deposit containers at the beginning. This spurred me and my friends to clean every roadside and field within reach of our bikes. For a month we made more money than we had known in our entire lives. Then it was ov…

It's a dime now, with 90% + recycling rates. But 30 cents is huge.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#117

Post by bunderbunder »

crooked-v wrote: post #7
SamReidHughes wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would create infinite other forms of garbage that people throw in the trash anyway.

Single-used cardboard wrappings for non-perishables don't have nearly as much impact on the environment as plastic, even if just thrown away.

It really depends on whether you value apples or oranges more highly.

My understanding is that paper fares better on the litter front, since even the stuff that escapes landfills still degrades quickly, while plastic tends to fare better on the carbon footprint front, because it's lighter (which reduces fuel burned to ship things) and less energy-intensive to manufacture.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#118

Post by fkistner »

majewsky wrote: post #109
fkistner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit pick, things work differently for multi-way and one-way containers: - There are no special regulations for multi-way bottles (glass and plastic alike). Most stores will accept only those they are incentivized to, i.e. the brands they sell (manufacturers are eager to get them back to be able to reuse them). - As soon as a store sells a kind of one-way container (plastic bottles, aluminum cans), they have to accept…

Re: one-way bottles, it was not always that easy. When the one-way deposit was introduced in ~2004, shops were only required to take their own SKUs back. This was absolutely horrible for consumers and producers alike, so retailers introduced the shared system voluntarily.

Good point. Fortunately, that seems to have been mandated by law since 2006 (at least for stores larger than 200m² ≅ 2150 sq ft).

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#119

Post by mikewilliams »

mdorazio wrote: post #95
wyattpeak wrote: post #50

People keep saying that China was accepting recyclables. They weren't accepting them, they were buying them. It's hard to make a case that it was all just trash when somebody was paying for it.

It wasn't all trash, but a significant portion was. Without expensive sorting machinery, recycling is generally only profitable with extremely cheap labor and a disregard for environmental damage caused by tossing the unprofitable stuff in the nearest dump. What was profitable for 1990s China would not have been profitable for the US.

Recycling will never be profitable, but we can't just keep burying trash and forgetting about it, or maybe we can, I don't know.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#120

Post by ngold »

Semaphor wrote: post #33
genocidicbunny wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has this as well -- CRV, but I dont see too many people taking advantage of it. Part of the problem is that most stores dont accept the bottles back -- you need to bring them to a recycling dropoff point that seem to be relatively rare and far in between.

Here in Germany, almost every store takes almost every bottle.

In oregon every store has to accept returns of at least what they sell, even convience stores.
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