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Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

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Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#191

Post by jdnenej »

karthikb wrote: post #132
viraptor wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction. What do you mean by "promotes growth" here? You pay for your recycling just like your trash. Why would any company like it more than reducing overall waste?

It reduces the moral barrier to buying new stuff. “Just buy it and recycle when you’re done!” The companies don’t deal with the costs of disposal.

Governments should tax products for their disposal costs. Eventually everything needs to be disposed of so charge it at purchase time and remove the costs the individual pays later for garbage collection. This would mean products that don't use wasteful packaging become cheaper and people would buy less junk.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#192

Post by c048 »

noobermin wrote: post #184

Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills. As mentioned elsewhere in this comment s…

Us sending our garbage to places like China, India, Indonesia has no bearing on us dumping our garbage in the ocean or not.

Those countries willingly bought our garbage and chose to dump whatever wasn't useful in the manner that they did, all by themselves. Insinuating that, if we didn't sell it, we'd also dump it in the ocean is more wishful(?) thinking than anything else.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#193

Post by shkkmo »

Thorrez wrote: post #116
shkkmo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations like recycling because it promotes growth -- the opposite of reduction. I don't think this is strictly true. It certainly is not the explanation for why we have most of the recycling programs we do have. Overpaying for unnecessary recycling reduces growth. Economically efficient recycling increases it. Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient re…

>Both corporations and environmentalists should support efficient recycling and oppose innefficient recycling. Are you saying that's what corporations should morally do, or that that's what they should logically do to increase profits? It could be that a corporation saying "buy our stuff then recycle it" causes more people to buy the stuff than saying "buy our stuff then throw it away". In that situation, a profit mo…

I'm speaking of broad interest categories. Obviously aluminum mining companies aren't going be in favor of aluminum recycling, but in general, lower aluminum prices increase economic growth potential and should be supported by other companies in general purely out of self-interest.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#194

Post by em-bee »

barry-cotter wrote: post #178
em-bee wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those people were moving to the west in search for a place to live. they moved because they couldn't live where they were. if they could afford to throw stuff away they probably would not have moved in the first place

To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead. North America was labour scarce compared to Europe from 1492 on. There was al…

i mean live on their own land and have their own farm instead of being a laborer depending on a salary. and since it was expensive many put all they had into that and could not afford to waste any of it.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#195

Post by bildung »

noobermin wrote: post #187
mikeash wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty common to see arguments that the net lifecycle impact of a hybrid outweighs that of a traditional car, because it has more impact in manufacturing. It’s not true (there is more impact in manufacturing, but the breakeven point is fairly early) but it’s an attractive notion to people with a contrarian bent, especially those who like to think that environmentalists are stupid. Incidentally, the same thing ex…

Solar panels are tricky because they rely on certain elements which are rather rare actually. I feel like there needs to be a serious study into whether increased mining/production of solar panels is a net gain or loss. It does feel however than reckoning with climate change will require more on the consumption/behavior side than technology side unfortunately.

Actually, PV energy pay back time has been studied to death. See e.g. this presentation from 2012, which says that the whole PV industry is already a net energy producer: https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/symposium2012/MikDale_Symp201...

The energy flow is a bit similar to the cash flow of a SAAS company: As ROI takes a few years, the start of the rapidly growing industry looks like a net negative, but with the installed capacity constantly growing and efficiency getting better, even the industry as a whole is in the black now.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#196

Post by iforgotpassword »

youngtaff wrote: post #181
pokeymcsnatch wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There solved your moral dilemma. Recycling has built up such inertia as the "moral" path, regardless of its inefficiencies for most materials, that it's become an unsustainable clusterfuck that we can't move away. Where I live, it's been codified- municipalities must recycle, and also must discourage landfill-bound waste. The result is that I've been issued a 64-gallon mixed-recycling bin that is picked up once a w…

As a family of three we have a 140 litre (~37 US Gallons) bin for non-recyclables that's collected every two weeks and it's normally only half full

Same here. We only got 60 liters for 3 guys and it's fine.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#197

Post by JonAtkinson »

c048 wrote: post #192
noobermin wrote: post #184

Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills. As mentioned elsewhere in this comment s…

Us sending our garbage to places like China, India, Indonesia has no bearing on us dumping our garbage in the ocean or not. Those countries willingly bought our garbage and chose to dump whatever wasn't useful in the manner that they did, all by themselves. Insinuating that, if we didn't sell it, we'd also dump it in the ocean is more wishful(?) thinking than anything else.

The idea that there is a joined-up strategy at a national level to ‘buy our garbage’ is weak.

These countries have immature regulatory and inspection regimes and garbage is being bought and dumped by for-profit entities because they can get away with doing so. It’s really ugly capitalism.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#198

Post by bildung »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #177
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strangely mainstream in American libertarian circles (and therefore places like HN), but even they seem to spend most of their time railing against the sheep-like masses who have been hoodwinked so I guess even that is a tacit admission that it's not mainstream. The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad. On the other hand, her…

Worrying about how carbon taxes will affect the poor is absolutely legitimate, and that's coming from someone that thinks we need one yesterday . Calling it baseless propaganda probably says more about you than it does the argument in question.

As a more generous interpretation of ZeroGravitas' comment: As the bird-and-windmill example shows, those people "worrying" are thought of as denying the fundamental viability of carbon taxes and only use the poor as a popular argument. Worrying about progressive taxation effects is of course very important, but then again also pretty easy to mitigate. And considering the fact that the parties propagating carbon taxes are mostly also the parties caring about the poor, I'm not very worried that the poor will be willingly outpriced of their mobility needs here. After all, that new tax makes the very resources available that would be needed to mitigate the unequal burden it would create.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#199

Post by emn13 »

noobermin wrote: post #184

Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills. As mentioned elsewhere in this comment s…

So while this is a problem, I doubt it's really all that related to landfills vs. recycling. Some of that exported waste was supposed to be recycled, almost certainly. It's likely that exporting for the purpose of recycling runs essentially the same risks, not to mention that you have to consider not just incompetence but outright malice too: why wouldn't a waste-processor not take stuff for recycling with the intent of never recycling in the first place? By the time the sender catches on, just let some intermediary go bankrupt, rinse, repeat.

Waste export problems have little to do with landfills vs. recycling. If anything, recycling has additional risks, because recycling is tricky and potentially labor intensive, making exports alluring, and because it has the veneer of cleanliness without good means to audit that.

However, if the argument is that exporting waste is generally speaking a bad idea, that obviously holds merit. International agreements, standards & cooperation obviously weren't robust&benign enough to ensure that works in the past, and all but the smallest of countries should be able to figure this stuff out themselves.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#200

Post by Etheryte »

noobermin wrote: post #184

Point 5 misses a bit of facts. The reason the US and the UK don't seep garbage into the ocean is we export a bit[0] of it to...guess where? Places like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. This[1] is relevant. Idk, that refutation alone makes one wonder how effective landfills are in the west if we must send our trash to other countries to keep from filling our own landfills. As mentioned elsewhere in this comment s…

Other countries buying up trash used to be a big market, but it is declining at a reasonably solid rate, [1] being a good example. So in broad terms, the point in the original article still applies.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...

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