51–60 of 324 posts
Yes, it’s a scam. Only aluminum actually gets recycled. It’s time to tax plastic so companies start using paper products (even if they go to landfill, they will at least sequester carbon there) or aluminum.
(Only trivially more effectively in practice as paper in an anaerobic environment won’tbreak down to any material degree)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.
I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story about how it was discovered in one town that all of the recycling was getting incinerated. It was then asked why they needed to sort everything, and the answer was that it was useful to help control the temperature of the incinerator. If the flame was too cool, throw in more plastic. Too hot, more wet compostable material.
Where I live now it isn't even possible, all recyclables go in one bin.
This article makes it sound like the main bottleneck in the first-run recycling process is sorting. Could anyone with knowledge around ML, robotics and the like chime in on napkin math around novel labor-reducing approaches to improving the operating economics here? From the sound of it, this is not really a solvable problem short of some leapfrog technological advance. Even then, you don’t want to spend more energy…
A friend and former boss of mine founded CleanRobotics which makes the TrashBot, a trash can that sorts trash from recyclables: https://cleanrobotics.com/trashbot/ I haven't seen the output so I can't comment on how well they work firsthand, but the idea is pretty cool. As far as I know (which is not far) they don't attempt to sort recyclables by material, unfortunately.
I'm sympathetic to litter concern, especially in the ocean, and some of the chemicals involved like BPA are a little worrying, but overall, the emissions involved just aren't that significant compared to other parts of modern life, and disposal is mostly a political problem. Developed countries that aren't Sweden aren't excited about burning trash, and countries like the US with tons of land somehow aren't that inter…
Generally the discussions are fairly low quality.
I am hopeful that the initiative which uses waste stream plastics as a component of asphalt will allow us to finally get some decent alternative to landfill for plastics. The best part about it was that the plastics didn't need to be sorted or clean; it is just going to be melted, pelletized and then mixed with hot tar to make asphalt. Since asphalt is now nearly infinitely recycled the plastics will be kept in use f…
I'm not as optimistic spreading plastics all over the ground to drive on is going to lead to less plastics escaping into the environment vs putting them in a landfill and covering them.
The other scale being microplastics leaking into the ground & our groundwater. I'm not really sure whether the asphalt thing helps with microplastics
The whole recycling scam makes me upset. For decades the message was to recycle for the environment. But it was all just shipped to China and then dumped into the oceans. It actually would've been better if it went to landfills, at least then it's safely contained. Another lie was that we're running out of landfill space, there's so much land out there. Like most environmental issues, the focus should've been on prod…
The message is and has been "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort.
It's almost like NPR constantly promoting the value of the news and not bringing up that only one story in a dozen (if that) relies on multiple sources with different viewpoints.
I can't remember where I read it but there was the view that recycling allows people to think they're environmentally responsible when they aren't. eg the typical family has multiple cars, lives in a big suburban house, has heating/ac buys loads of stuff but recycles their cardboard/glass so thinks their environmental impact is small.