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Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

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Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#311

Post by aeternus »

henrikschroder wrote: post #213
dillonmckay wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much energy does it take to recycle newsprint into blank newsprint? What chemicals are involved in that process? Is cardboard similar? Does this take into account the logistics costs?

The alternative to recycling newspaper and cardboard is chopping down forests and turning them into pulp, a process that also needs a lot more logistics, chemicals, energy, and of course forests that you have to re-plant. Recycling newspaper is a no-brainer from a cost perspective. You can't recycle forever though, each time you lose some wood fibers that are too short and have to be removed from the recycled pulp, s…

Pretty much all paper manufacturers are now require to plant more trees than they cut down.

Burying old newspapers in the ground is a form of carbon sequestration. Really it comes down to what takes less energy: cutting down the trees, or the transport, sorting and reprocessing of old newspapers.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#312

Post by kragen »

noobermin wrote: post #205
bildung wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 installe…

So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted. Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electri…

Nearly all current photovoltaic cell production is polysilicon, which does not require any rare elements or any rare-earth elements. There are some PV technologies that use rare elements such as indium and selenium, but they do not use rare-earth elements either; and, in any case, they have been pretty much priced out of the market by falling polysilicon costs. There are many kinds of rechargeable batteries, but none of them, to my knowledge, use rare-earth elements. In particular, the lithium-ion batteries in current large-scale use do not even use any rare elements. (Nickel-cadmium batteries used cadmium, which is about as rare as silver, but not a rare-earth element.)

Finally, rare earth elements are not rare (a dozen of them are each individually more abundant than tin), and there is no danger of depleting them.

These are the factual errors in the first factual sentence of your comment. This level of reliability leads me to believe that you are commenting with no concern for whether your comment is true or false, even without doing a similar level of investigation of the rest of your comment.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#313

Post by aeternus »

grive wrote: post #183
stretchwithme wrote: post #95

Eventually, robots will go through all of the landfills and recover a lot of the materials in it. And they might get all the energy they need to do it from the garbage itself. Hey, if insects can do it, robots will eventually be able to do it.

That's just magical thinking. Nothing suggests that it is in the realm of possibility. What is the energy potential in the materials in a landfill? How much is wasted by scouring them and trying to properly extract it? Compared to preventing the capture of those materials there in the first place? Putting the survival of our species on the possibility of some pixie dust is not rational. It is hard to face the truth,…

It's not magical thinking, landfill mining has been in-use since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining

If certain resources do get more sparse, it will easily become economically viable to expand landfill mining and we already have the technology required to do so. At the end of the day, it's an energy question more than anything. With cheap solar plus the fact that landfills produce their own free energy (methane) there is no need to be alarmist and consider them a threat to our species.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#314

Post by noobermin »

bildung wrote: post #216
noobermin wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted. Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electri…

Absolutely, reduction should aways be the first option. Just like electric cars are still just a band aid for unsustainable urban design. The optimum would be more human-centric cities that reduce most needs for powered mobility. I have the luck to be able to live like that and it's just great. School, daycare, shopping and our workplaces are all within a 2km radius. Thus our household doesn't need any car, but every…

You might in fact be right about that.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#315

Post by negativez »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #240
contactlight11 wrote: post #154

How about this information from CT's DEEP which quotes the EPA for the majority of it's information? Compared to virgin materials, using recycled materials more efficient by: - 40% for paper - 60-74% for steel and tin cans - 33% for plastics - 30% for glass - 5% for aluminum cans These numbers appear to be referencing the generation of new products using recycled vs new materials, but do they fail to take in to accou…

There's the in-home cost. My mother-in-law would run the cans and bottles through the dishwasher before putting them in the rcycle bin. The energy, hot water, soap constituted a catastrophic reversal of any possible gain from the recycling. Just driving the truck around the neighborhood to pick up the bins is a cost in diesel, human resources (which translate to carbon at some level).

On a related note:

I live in a city where trash collection rates are tied to how big of a trashcan you have. Along with recycling and compost collection programs, this is intended to deter people from overusing the landfill.

BUT, as a result of having a very small trashcan (to minimize my personal cost) I end up putting the can out every week if the can is even 1/4 full, as I occasionally have a heavy week due to an event or seasonal cleaning and I don't want to have garbage around the place for extra week(s). The desired effect on my waste habits, i.e. reducing the amount of landfill trash I ultimately produce, is negligible.

Therefore the garbage truck must stop at my house roughly twice as often as it would if there was no disincentive cost to having a large can. If enough other people in my city operate like I do, then we're running a significant amount of extra trucks and labor for virtually no benefit.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#316

Post by pfdietz »

kragen wrote: post #312
noobermin wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I did say production, but my main issue isn't mere production but the mining of materials and that mining's impact on the environment. Also, PVs and rechargable batteries do use some rare earths which also sucks because, well they're rare and may eventually be depleted. Regardless, thanks for the talk, it's interesting. I think someone told me a while back they did an analysis of the difference between gas electri…

Nearly all current photovoltaic cell production is polysilicon, which does not require any rare elements or any rare-earth elements. There are some PV technologies that use rare elements such as indium and selenium, but they do not use rare-earth elements either; and, in any case, they have been pretty much priced out of the market by falling polysilicon costs. There are many kinds of rechargeable batteries, but none…

I think he was suckered by a deliberate propaganda effort to paint PV as dirty. Shellenberger was spreading that BS, and others picked it up without being sufficiently skeptical.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#317

Post by pfdietz »

remcob wrote: post #201
contactlight11 wrote: post #154

How about this information from CT's DEEP which quotes the EPA for the majority of it's information? Compared to virgin materials, using recycled materials more efficient by: - 40% for paper - 60-74% for steel and tin cans - 33% for plastics - 30% for glass - 5% for aluminum cans These numbers appear to be referencing the generation of new products using recycled vs new materials, but do they fail to take in to accou…

This only looks at energy consumed during production, not at (long term) availability of raw materials. It seems reasonable to assume that long term the cost of energy and recyclables will go down and that of non-renewables such as oils and ores will go up.

We better worry about running out of aluminum. After all, it's only the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust. /s

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#318

Post by pfdietz »

jacobush wrote: post #235
Aloha wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we only used two kinds of plastic for food or consumer packaging, plastic recycling would make more sense, we unfortunately use like 10, which means s high labor cost for sorting.

Plus a myriad of additives in the plastic, plus various contaminants. Which makes it kind of hard of to recycle without seriously degrading the end product, even if we had everything nailed to spec and not the chaos we are in now. I my book, we need to make energy production seriously cheap (renewables, plus maybe nuclear) and put some of the energy excess into transporting heavier but inert packaging such as glass,…

In a 100% renewable economy, there will be a need for storable chemical energy for filling rare prolonged outages of wind and solar. Refuse, and in particular high energy density refuse like plastics (made from renewables feedstocks), would be good for this.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#319

Post by pixl97 »

slavik81 wrote: post #171
triangulum wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good point: if municipalities want you to recycle, they need to provide the necessary infrastructure, and that means at least three source separated bins (ideally 5-7), and a clean container collection system. Otherwise it just turns people off the whole system. A financial incentive to save money when you don’t throw away as much into the landfill bin helps too. Any chance you could compost the kitchen scra…

Ideally you would incentivize people to create less trash by charging them by weight or volume for collection, but there are two possibilities for households wanting lower bills: reducing waste or littering. And it only takes a few people choosing littering to make a huge mess. I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It al…

This also why I like the idea of bottle deposits and would hope they continue into many other containers. The customer pays them up front and gets paid back when it properly enters the waste stream.

Re: Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated

#320

Post by spopejoy »

Two of this article's sources are John Tierney who has had it out against recycling since the 90s, and has written other anti-environmentalist pieces, including a hit piece on Rachel Carson in 2007 that sang the praises of DDT spraying in third world countries [1]. For a takedown of the FUD in that one see [2].

Simply put if this author trusts Tierney it's a reason not to trust this author.

1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/earth/05tier.html 2 - https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/06/06/john-tierneys-ba...

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