Recycling is such a sham. I wish we as a nation (US) would come to terms that most products are not economical to recycle. It could actually move the needle on consumption when you know that’s it’s going to be thrown away. About the only thing worth recycling in the US is metal. The rest including glass are just junk. Most folks don’t realize that glass they throw in their recycling is often going to the landfill because they live too far away from a glass manufacturer for it to be economical to use.
I don’t say this as someone who is suggesting we not think about consumption but rather it’s a fake feeling that it’s going somewhere other than the landfill. I would be curious in other countries how economical it really is to recycle.my favorite is Japan where some areas will incinerate certain qualities of plastic for energy. I think that is a useful way to reuse it.
Glass is not entirely useless to recycle, but it's marginal. If the goal is to keep it out of landfills, then separating it can make sense, even if the recycling is just downcycling to a lower value use (like road aggregate or fiberglass insulation).
I've heard Glass Beach in California is nice; maybe we should create some more of those by dumping waste glass on a shore with wave action and waiting a few decades? (not entirely unserious)
You’re not wrong but the whole story is not being told. For most glass to be recycled and used it needs to go to a processing plant to make the cullet. There are geographical constrains on weight so if you don’t happen to live close enough to one, that glass is going in the landfill my gripe is we have created a catch all recycling is good no matter what.
It could otherwise be reused? A lot of glass containers come with a deposit and then are reused once returned. This happens with some glass milk containers (exactly why I dont know). If container shape and size became somewhat standardized this could work better. Glass can be reused while not shedding microplastic everywhere in the process.
I learned this a decade ago when I learned that a lot of recycling lots were bought by China and other countries who are no longer buying our recyclables. Probably for the reasons you mentioned. Metals are about the only thing worth recycling. Everything else, the transportation costs out weigh the economics.
That said, there are smaller plastic filament recyclers that are making their way onto the market that I’m super keen on. Being able to take plastics, shred them up, put them in this extruder and make a new filament spool for printing is awesome.
Is that form of plastic reuse really all that great? Perhaps new plastic doesn't need to get produced. But it's still plastic and it's still going to just shed microplastics everywhere and eventually end up in a landfill.
> How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?
None of it. With a few exceptions, non-metals take significantly more energy to recycle than to make from scratch and the end result is lower quality than the recycled material. Since that energy usually comes from fossil fuels, it's just pumping more CO2 in the atmosphere to save a tiny bit of landfill space, which isn't even remotely a pressing issue for our civilization (we have lots of space!)
Metals like aluminum and steel take more energy to make from scratch (ore) than to recycle, so they're worth recycling and anywhere from 50-80% of the steel and aluminum feedstock in the world is from scrap metal.
It also makes sense to recycle stuff like old tires because those turn into massive ecological hazards when they burn.
There is more to recycling than energy consumption.
For example, wood is a limited resource. In many parts of the world, almost all growth outside protected areas is harvested and used. By recycling paper and cardboard, you make wood available for higher-value uses.
Household waste is often incinerated. Even if you are not going to recycle glass, it can make sense to separate it from general waste.
Energy is only one part. The full dollar cost should be accounted for. Wood is abundant in parts of the world. For those parts it probably makes no sense to recycling but we should let the market figure it out.
Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if your waste is incinerated, rather than sent to a landfill directly).
Glass, plastic, and paper are generally at best marginal for recycling, especially because they can be sensitive to contamination in the recycling process (oops, somebody threw a greasy pizza box in the recycling!). Glass and some kinds of plastic products work really well for reuse rather than recycling, but a municipal recycling stream isn't conducive to reuse; you're probably more likely to see them ground up and 'recycled' as some kind of aggregate. For plastic, I'd expect that just about only a plastic water bottle or the like is close to practicably recyclable.
And this is where I wish local collection agencies and companies focused on. Be clear. That paper, throw in the trash. Collect metals, glass if it’s feasible because you are close to a glass manufacturer. But nothing else.
That’s my gripe there is no clear rule set and it’s highly localized and in those localized areas there are no clear guidelines. Most collection companies just say they take everything when it fact some or a lot of what’s being collected gets sent to the landfill.
Plastic bags separated from other trash/recycables brought to the store wouldn’t be much of a problem for Kroger. I don’t think consumers would bother unless a deposit was involved.
Is repair really economical? I would think the time and money it takes makes that impractical too. Not buying as much stuff feels like the only real solution
Metals, eWaste, Batteries ... all profitable to recycle.
Paper & cardboard ... depends on market price.
Plastics ... depends on oil prices, market price and type of plastic.
Tires ... usually profitable, usually involves a hauling fee.
AMP's robotic solution is going to face immense competition from general edge models, probably very soon. The mechanical piece is simple engineering. All the magic is (was) recognition.
Everything here other than Metals and Tires are basically only useful in the extremes where your inputs are exceedingly clean.
Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.
This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.
The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.
It is a mixed bag but the way it’s handled and marketed in the US is absolutely a sham. Consumers are led to feel good that they are recycling when often that item is getting tossed in the landfill.
But your callouts don’t make sense to me. Paper is rarely economical. We were mostly shipping it to China for the longest time. Only like 8% of plastics in the US are recycled. Most local waste systems don’t bother because the cost to sort far exceeds the value of the plastic. That’s the sham part and it’s prevalent across the country. The only reason tires work is because of government programs.
Again I am not saying recycling is bad but I wish in the US it was clearer and more strict. I would rather my local trash pickup tell me exactly what they want instead of following the propaganda that I can throw in paper and plastics when I know they are mostly throwing those in the dump.
They're very strict about sorting your own recycling, organic waste, and household waste here in Zurich. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. And also there are newspaper articles with the format of reporting on someone receiving a fine and how thankful they are now that they know the proper way to recycle (obviously planted - I had to write an article like this in junior high because I used the school phone to call 911 to ask the time).
What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. I mean, even with these strict rules they still need to sort the stuff that people didn't sort properly in the first place. So why not sort it all? (Except for the biowaste because that could contaminate the recycling)
There's a lot of things that really jam up recycling.
One of them is plastic grocery bags. They just cause a lot of problems in the mechanisation of recycling so it's very non-trivial to work around them.
Oils and biowaste of course are of course another issue. Especially for corrugated fiberboard (brandname: cardboard) and the like.
And then also it's hard for machines or lineworkers to easily differentiate plastics without sufficient market or regulatory pressure. If consumers are already generally sorting by broad category then they take most of the legwork out (leaving the facility to check their work) and those consumers also apply market pressure on manufacturers to make it obvious how their product is expected to be recycled.
And of course also there's just a general component of everyone doing a little at a time to keep things organised from the start making the entire process an order of magnitude easier and more efficient for everyone downstream.
It is a free for all in USA, sometimes the trash truck comes down and grabs both recycling bins and trash bins and just dumps all into the same truck. No one cares, customer or trash service company. Many facilities dont sort if sorting becomes too much work they just toss what was picked up as reycling into the trash. Walk inside any warehouse type facility in America and they throw anything and everything into the trash that has lost its utility for the business. Working inside an order fulfillment warehouse opened my eyes to how much waste is created just to pack and ship everyones cheap single use junk. Bottle deposits haven't been adjusted for inflation in decades, no one even talks about it. States that dont have deposit laws people just litter aluminim cans everywhere. When there are bottle deposit laws they have exceptions like no deposit required for aluminum can if its contents are not carbonated. Why should that matter? Most people toss their food waste into the trash, effectively no one bothers with the effort to return nutrients back into the earth. Why do that when we can just pointlessly haul it away in a fuel burning truck and seal it away with toxic everyday garbage. The people who actually care about re-use and or reducing waste are tiny vocal minority compared to everyone else. When I walk into a grocery story filled with 100+ shoppers I am always the only person using reusable, non-plastic bags. I also laugh when if you don't use plastic bags, they slap plastic stickers on your items thanking you for not using plastic bags LOL. I know other countries are worse with pollution but gosh. Sounds nice in Zurich if there's actually people that care.
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
That depends. The big is there is so much volume that isn't recyclable that the costs of machines to sort everything (when most is waste) is just too high.
As the other post started to get to: for some things clean waste matters and is common enough to sort. If you have greasy paper about all that we can do is burn it, but clean paper has enough value as to be worth it. Thus a separate stream for clean cardboard/paper is something that should be done early.
For other things cleaning isn't as big a deal (unless you can get perfect clean they will need to clean again - but you still want it not to stink). Throw all your plastic (no bags - unless you have the rare system that can handle them), cans, and glass together: They have to sort anyway, but compartments for each (or separate trucks) are going to add up costs - One week there is more cans than others so you end up going back to the facility with half full compartments all the time burned fuel each way.
You still want to separate trash, (even if the bag issue was solved) as there is so much that we can't really do anything about that the quantity means the sorting machines needed to handle total volumes are too high unless most things we know can't be recycled are not in.
I'm not sure about organics. My impression is that most houses don't have enough of it as to be worth the bother in general. Businesses that have enough as to be worth it should also separate their kitchen waste but otherwise more fuel is burned in the trucks than we save.
We also have to ask what is done with regular waste. Landfills are slow compost piles for organics, and we do collect the methane these days. Incinerators turn organics and plastics into fuel which is often the best we can do with them (recycling plastics still needs a lot of energy/chemicals, burning releases some CO2, but perhaps less than the above - this has been argued many times to different conclusions)
The Ford Bronco assembly plant is near a large landfill where the methane is captured and used in the plant. Fans of other brands joke that the Bronco is literally made from garbage.
Bronco fans could counter with this: so are Princess Catherine's (rather not cheap) shoes. She is a fan of a brand called Rothy's, which makes casual footwear out of recycled plastic bottles that sell for $150 or so/pair.
It makes a big difference. We'll sorted garbage is easier to deal with.
I watched this video from Andrew Fraser on Indonesias plastic recycling industry. There were a few points during the documentary where this is pointed out. I had gemini point them out and verified them.
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The documentary indicates that separating rubbish bins at the source is important because it eliminates an entire process and makes almost everything recyclable (14:18 - 14:24).
The speaker contrasts the Indonesian system, where scavengers sort mixed waste, with Western systems where waste is separated at the source (2:00 - 2:08, 6:57 - 7:00). At a modern processing facility, the speaker notes that if waste is not separated at the source, some material becomes too dirty to recycle (14:26 - 14:29, 20:26 - 20:29).
Furthermore, the video highlights that imported plastics from Western nations are highly valuable because they are clean, dry, sorted, and high-grade, having gone directly into the recycling side of consumer bins (28:57 - 29:11). This high-quality imported plastic is essential for Indonesian recycling plants like PMS to mix with lower-quality local waste, allowing them to process more raw domestic waste and create more jobs (28:01 - 28:27).
Sorting, and charging different prices for different types of waste (typical in Europe, don’t know elsewhere), also provides economic and psychological incentives to potentially reduce purchases of certain type.
Since people make mistakes in categorization and sorting, recycling facilities have to do it over again. It's redundant. So why do they never the less have people sort? It's just a psychological tool: It makes people 'care' and it makes people think society at large, including the recycling company cares. Now, that doesn't mean the company doesn't care about recycling in and of itself --they probably do to some extent, but they also need to project outwardly that they care.
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes.
Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem.
Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
>. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly.
Some parts of Oregon I lived in had high cost for general trash (almost every trash bin/dumpster I encountered was chained locked) and to use the city dump you needed an ID and maybe even required to live in the same county.
The result of these asinine policies to force people into 'recycling' things that aren't recyclable and making trash so onerous that all you can find is locked up dumpsters, is you would often see piles of trash and junk in the national forest or BLM land, the result of either extreme inconvenience or desperation.
That dumping is probably not about recycling policies, but more about the cost of trash. Illegal dumping still happens in places where recycling is barely offered.
Just adding to the conversation: I can strongly recommend the documentary The Story Of Plastic to get an insight on recycling in general.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. I used to be big on trying to reduce my plastic usage, but I gave up on it because the more I got aware of how f*'d up it all is, the more guilty and depressed I started to feel. It felt like fighting a hydra.
I've witnessed it myself: a lot of the waste that gets recycled by the consumer gets thrown on the same pile and goes in the same incinerator. It's not economically feasable to properly recycle plastics. It's all bs greenwashing.
I just stopped caring at some point and became a little more pessimistic about humanity. Sad really.
Plastic recycling is worse than useless: due to the filtration needs it's one of the larger contributors towards microplastics in the water supply. This is on top of all the other factors: any recycle-able plastics go in for another 1-2 rounds at most, and given the pace of plastic usage it means the recycling did not accomplish anything. Further, most plastic cannot be recycled, some 3rd party countries just dump it into the ocean, others just ship it to a landfill.
I'd be more rational to give up on most plastic recycling and just burn it industrially, like in waste power plants or to generate process heat. You get decent heat output, it burns fairly cleanly, and any toxins can be filtered. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than burning 'fresh' oil or gas for the same purpose while doing this whole plastic-recycling charade
I agree that a lot of plastic recycling is greenwashing from the manufacturing industry.
I've seen the statistics, and we need to take dramatic steps in order to reduce the amount of single use plastics – but don't you think that it's better that we try?
I hear you about micro plastics, and I think that it's important to try to do better to fix this.
But given the limitations of our imperfect world, do you really think that we would be net-net better off without even making an attempt to recycle it?
>But given the limitations of our imperfect world, do you really think that we would be net-net better off without even making an attempt to recycle it?
This really depends on the specifics of how much we can move the needle. For instance, there's zero chance we're fully getting rid of plastics. Even in a world where we had perfect political will, you'd need them at a minimum for medical tools.
With regard to microplastic pollution, I think I'd need more information on the major causes. For instance, I've heard that car tires are one of the biggest causes on land, whereas fishing nets are one of the biggest causes in the ocean. To the extent that this is correct, recycling is not going to impact those problems one way or another. If for instance I were to learn that microplastic pollution from recycling was so minimal it can barely be measured, I would be open to changing my position. (my understanding that plastic recycling is a significant cause of microplastic pollution.)
I've rambled a bit here, but ultimately the question needs to be answered whether plastic recycling is doing more harm than good. If it's doing more harm then it makes no sense to "at least try," as "success" would put us in a worse position.
I've always assumed we'll end up re-processing landfills when it hits an economic tipping point: better tech emerges, raw sources are exhausted, etc.
There's a story in Junkyard Planet of this exact thing making someone wealthy when a product that was treated as waste became valuable to the steel industry, and they knew where to find it in the dump.
I wonder this too, eventually robots will pick apart the landfills once there is technology to deal with it. Tons of metal goes into landfills that could go to scrap yards, etc Altho when they cap off landfills they become a ski resort or a subvision.
This. I support recycling, but it is an absolute wasted endeavor so long as we continue to produce and dump plastic. No amount of recycling can hold a candle to the damage being done by the inability to recycle plastic, the insane production of new plastic, and the disposable of all of that plastic.
Until we learn to do something with the plastic, recycling is just a pipe dream to make people feel better.
It would to interesting to compare the "virtuous" reasons offered in these comments for hating recycling with USA vs EU (or other high Vs low recycling areas, like countries or states).
Does the USA or Missisippi have the lower recycling rate because they are uniquely immune to the corporate oil lobby that scammed Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium?
Is it because they instead reduce their consumption and reuse their empty containers unlike the lazy Belgians who are too addicted to feeling virtuous? Has the EU plastic use risen more than in America, because of recycling?
This is a marketing press release about two industries that are not particularly trustworthy in their claims. I would not out any stock in any assertion made within.
Both of those are extremely recyclable and have more manageable separation problems. There's not much of a solar recycling industry because the panels generally have longer lifetimes than the minimum advertised - they last until weather damage.
(the thin film ones are a separate category, some of which contain more poisonous materials, but fortunately they were never really economic)
Recycling is such a sham. I wish we as a nation (US) would come to terms that most products are not economical to recycle. It could actually move the needle on consumption when you know that’s it’s going to be thrown away. About the only thing worth recycling in the US is metal. The rest including glass are just junk. Most folks don’t realize that glass they throw in their recycling is often going to the landfill because they live too far away from a glass manufacturer for it to be economical to use.
I don’t say this as someone who is suggesting we not think about consumption but rather it’s a fake feeling that it’s going somewhere other than the landfill. I would be curious in other countries how economical it really is to recycle.my favorite is Japan where some areas will incinerate certain qualities of plastic for energy. I think that is a useful way to reuse it.
Glass is not entirely useless to recycle, but it's marginal. If the goal is to keep it out of landfills, then separating it can make sense, even if the recycling is just downcycling to a lower value use (like road aggregate or fiberglass insulation).
I've heard Glass Beach in California is nice; maybe we should create some more of those by dumping waste glass on a shore with wave action and waiting a few decades? (not entirely unserious)
You’re not wrong but the whole story is not being told. For most glass to be recycled and used it needs to go to a processing plant to make the cullet. There are geographical constrains on weight so if you don’t happen to live close enough to one, that glass is going in the landfill my gripe is we have created a catch all recycling is good no matter what.
What possible reason is there for keeping glass out of a landfill?
Landfills are engineered at some cost to retain nasty liquids and gases that are produced. Glass doesn't need any of that.
Or, if you're going to put glass in a landfill, it could be cheaper to put it into a glass-only landfill that wouldn't need those protections.
If you're going to burn the waste them removing glass first makes that easier.
It could otherwise be reused? A lot of glass containers come with a deposit and then are reused once returned. This happens with some glass milk containers (exactly why I dont know). If container shape and size became somewhat standardized this could work better. Glass can be reused while not shedding microplastic everywhere in the process.
Landfill space is limited, best only to throw out what cannot be repurposed from a physical space perspective.
I learned this a decade ago when I learned that a lot of recycling lots were bought by China and other countries who are no longer buying our recyclables. Probably for the reasons you mentioned. Metals are about the only thing worth recycling. Everything else, the transportation costs out weigh the economics.
That said, there are smaller plastic filament recyclers that are making their way onto the market that I’m super keen on. Being able to take plastics, shred them up, put them in this extruder and make a new filament spool for printing is awesome.
Is that form of plastic reuse really all that great? Perhaps new plastic doesn't need to get produced. But it's still plastic and it's still going to just shed microplastics everywhere and eventually end up in a landfill.
So, as a consumer (in the US), should we just dump everything in a landfill?
Or is it still worth it for some things? What about:
- Clean paper/cardboard
- Plastic grocery bags that go to a separate recycling center
How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?
I’ve tried to “do my part”, but the more I hear people talk about it, the more it sounds like we’re better off just landfilling it all.
> How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?
None of it. With a few exceptions, non-metals take significantly more energy to recycle than to make from scratch and the end result is lower quality than the recycled material. Since that energy usually comes from fossil fuels, it's just pumping more CO2 in the atmosphere to save a tiny bit of landfill space, which isn't even remotely a pressing issue for our civilization (we have lots of space!)
Metals like aluminum and steel take more energy to make from scratch (ore) than to recycle, so they're worth recycling and anywhere from 50-80% of the steel and aluminum feedstock in the world is from scrap metal.
It also makes sense to recycle stuff like old tires because those turn into massive ecological hazards when they burn.
There is more to recycling than energy consumption.
For example, wood is a limited resource. In many parts of the world, almost all growth outside protected areas is harvested and used. By recycling paper and cardboard, you make wood available for higher-value uses.
Household waste is often incinerated. Even if you are not going to recycle glass, it can make sense to separate it from general waste.
Energy is only one part. The full dollar cost should be accounted for. Wood is abundant in parts of the world. For those parts it probably makes no sense to recycling but we should let the market figure it out.
Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if your waste is incinerated, rather than sent to a landfill directly).
Glass, plastic, and paper are generally at best marginal for recycling, especially because they can be sensitive to contamination in the recycling process (oops, somebody threw a greasy pizza box in the recycling!). Glass and some kinds of plastic products work really well for reuse rather than recycling, but a municipal recycling stream isn't conducive to reuse; you're probably more likely to see them ground up and 'recycled' as some kind of aggregate. For plastic, I'd expect that just about only a plastic water bottle or the like is close to practicably recyclable.
And this is where I wish local collection agencies and companies focused on. Be clear. That paper, throw in the trash. Collect metals, glass if it’s feasible because you are close to a glass manufacturer. But nothing else.
That’s my gripe there is no clear rule set and it’s highly localized and in those localized areas there are no clear guidelines. Most collection companies just say they take everything when it fact some or a lot of what’s being collected gets sent to the landfill.
> Clean paper/cardboard
This, plus soiled paper, can go in the "yard waste" bin here in western Washington state where it is sent to an industrial composter.
To me it seems like the simple solution is to just require sellers to accept disposal of items (or parts of items) they sold.
If people started bringing back zillions of plastic bags to Krogers for disposal you bet they'd figure out reduce or re-use real fast.
Plastic bags separated from other trash/recycables brought to the store wouldn’t be much of a problem for Kroger. I don’t think consumers would bother unless a deposit was involved.
In my state, grocery stores literally do take plastic bags back, they have standardized drop off bins and everything.
And I have read accounts that some of those stores simply toss them into the garbage in the back.
Composting might be more meaningful to the environment then recycling as reduces methane from food decomposing in a landfill.
(Methane accounts for 1/3 of global warming)
Part of this current article/press release's focus is extracting organic waste from the waste stream for this reason. They convert it to biochar.
Is repair really economical? I would think the time and money it takes makes that impractical too. Not buying as much stuff feels like the only real solution
No. Its a mixed bag.
Metals, eWaste, Batteries ... all profitable to recycle.
Paper & cardboard ... depends on market price.
Plastics ... depends on oil prices, market price and type of plastic.
Tires ... usually profitable, usually involves a hauling fee.
AMP's robotic solution is going to face immense competition from general edge models, probably very soon. The mechanical piece is simple engineering. All the magic is (was) recognition.
Everything here other than Metals and Tires are basically only useful in the extremes where your inputs are exceedingly clean.
Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.
This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.
The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.
It is a mixed bag but the way it’s handled and marketed in the US is absolutely a sham. Consumers are led to feel good that they are recycling when often that item is getting tossed in the landfill.
But your callouts don’t make sense to me. Paper is rarely economical. We were mostly shipping it to China for the longest time. Only like 8% of plastics in the US are recycled. Most local waste systems don’t bother because the cost to sort far exceeds the value of the plastic. That’s the sham part and it’s prevalent across the country. The only reason tires work is because of government programs.
Again I am not saying recycling is bad but I wish in the US it was clearer and more strict. I would rather my local trash pickup tell me exactly what they want instead of following the propaganda that I can throw in paper and plastics when I know they are mostly throwing those in the dump.
They're very strict about sorting your own recycling, organic waste, and household waste here in Zurich. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. And also there are newspaper articles with the format of reporting on someone receiving a fine and how thankful they are now that they know the proper way to recycle (obviously planted - I had to write an article like this in junior high because I used the school phone to call 911 to ask the time).
What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. I mean, even with these strict rules they still need to sort the stuff that people didn't sort properly in the first place. So why not sort it all? (Except for the biowaste because that could contaminate the recycling)
There's a lot of things that really jam up recycling.
One of them is plastic grocery bags. They just cause a lot of problems in the mechanisation of recycling so it's very non-trivial to work around them.
Oils and biowaste of course are of course another issue. Especially for corrugated fiberboard (brandname: cardboard) and the like.
And then also it's hard for machines or lineworkers to easily differentiate plastics without sufficient market or regulatory pressure. If consumers are already generally sorting by broad category then they take most of the legwork out (leaving the facility to check their work) and those consumers also apply market pressure on manufacturers to make it obvious how their product is expected to be recycled.
And of course also there's just a general component of everyone doing a little at a time to keep things organised from the start making the entire process an order of magnitude easier and more efficient for everyone downstream.
It is a free for all in USA, sometimes the trash truck comes down and grabs both recycling bins and trash bins and just dumps all into the same truck. No one cares, customer or trash service company. Many facilities dont sort if sorting becomes too much work they just toss what was picked up as reycling into the trash. Walk inside any warehouse type facility in America and they throw anything and everything into the trash that has lost its utility for the business. Working inside an order fulfillment warehouse opened my eyes to how much waste is created just to pack and ship everyones cheap single use junk. Bottle deposits haven't been adjusted for inflation in decades, no one even talks about it. States that dont have deposit laws people just litter aluminim cans everywhere. When there are bottle deposit laws they have exceptions like no deposit required for aluminum can if its contents are not carbonated. Why should that matter? Most people toss their food waste into the trash, effectively no one bothers with the effort to return nutrients back into the earth. Why do that when we can just pointlessly haul it away in a fuel burning truck and seal it away with toxic everyday garbage. The people who actually care about re-use and or reducing waste are tiny vocal minority compared to everyone else. When I walk into a grocery story filled with 100+ shoppers I am always the only person using reusable, non-plastic bags. I also laugh when if you don't use plastic bags, they slap plastic stickers on your items thanking you for not using plastic bags LOL. I know other countries are worse with pollution but gosh. Sounds nice in Zurich if there's actually people that care.
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
That depends. The big is there is so much volume that isn't recyclable that the costs of machines to sort everything (when most is waste) is just too high.
As the other post started to get to: for some things clean waste matters and is common enough to sort. If you have greasy paper about all that we can do is burn it, but clean paper has enough value as to be worth it. Thus a separate stream for clean cardboard/paper is something that should be done early.
For other things cleaning isn't as big a deal (unless you can get perfect clean they will need to clean again - but you still want it not to stink). Throw all your plastic (no bags - unless you have the rare system that can handle them), cans, and glass together: They have to sort anyway, but compartments for each (or separate trucks) are going to add up costs - One week there is more cans than others so you end up going back to the facility with half full compartments all the time burned fuel each way.
You still want to separate trash, (even if the bag issue was solved) as there is so much that we can't really do anything about that the quantity means the sorting machines needed to handle total volumes are too high unless most things we know can't be recycled are not in.
I'm not sure about organics. My impression is that most houses don't have enough of it as to be worth the bother in general. Businesses that have enough as to be worth it should also separate their kitchen waste but otherwise more fuel is burned in the trucks than we save.
We also have to ask what is done with regular waste. Landfills are slow compost piles for organics, and we do collect the methane these days. Incinerators turn organics and plastics into fuel which is often the best we can do with them (recycling plastics still needs a lot of energy/chemicals, burning releases some CO2, but perhaps less than the above - this has been argued many times to different conclusions)
The Ford Bronco assembly plant is near a large landfill where the methane is captured and used in the plant. Fans of other brands joke that the Bronco is literally made from garbage.
Bronco fans could counter with this: so are Princess Catherine's (rather not cheap) shoes. She is a fan of a brand called Rothy's, which makes casual footwear out of recycled plastic bottles that sell for $150 or so/pair.
It makes a big difference. We'll sorted garbage is easier to deal with.
I watched this video from Andrew Fraser on Indonesias plastic recycling industry. There were a few points during the documentary where this is pointed out. I had gemini point them out and verified them.
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The documentary indicates that separating rubbish bins at the source is important because it eliminates an entire process and makes almost everything recyclable (14:18 - 14:24).
The speaker contrasts the Indonesian system, where scavengers sort mixed waste, with Western systems where waste is separated at the source (2:00 - 2:08, 6:57 - 7:00). At a modern processing facility, the speaker notes that if waste is not separated at the source, some material becomes too dirty to recycle (14:26 - 14:29, 20:26 - 20:29).
Furthermore, the video highlights that imported plastics from Western nations are highly valuable because they are clean, dry, sorted, and high-grade, having gone directly into the recycling side of consumer bins (28:57 - 29:11). This high-quality imported plastic is essential for Indonesian recycling plants like PMS to mix with lower-quality local waste, allowing them to process more raw domestic waste and create more jobs (28:01 - 28:27).
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https://youtu.be/AyvgDUled7w?si=z0zkqGOsBLajXkqg
Sorting, and charging different prices for different types of waste (typical in Europe, don’t know elsewhere), also provides economic and psychological incentives to potentially reduce purchases of certain type.
> I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
It’s a logical argument, but I feel another punishment in your future.
Since people make mistakes in categorization and sorting, recycling facilities have to do it over again. It's redundant. So why do they never the less have people sort? It's just a psychological tool: It makes people 'care' and it makes people think society at large, including the recycling company cares. Now, that doesn't mean the company doesn't care about recycling in and of itself --they probably do to some extent, but they also need to project outwardly that they care.
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes.
Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem.
Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
>. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly.
Some parts of Oregon I lived in had high cost for general trash (almost every trash bin/dumpster I encountered was chained locked) and to use the city dump you needed an ID and maybe even required to live in the same county.
The result of these asinine policies to force people into 'recycling' things that aren't recyclable and making trash so onerous that all you can find is locked up dumpsters, is you would often see piles of trash and junk in the national forest or BLM land, the result of either extreme inconvenience or desperation.
That dumping is probably not about recycling policies, but more about the cost of trash. Illegal dumping still happens in places where recycling is barely offered.
Just adding to the conversation: I can strongly recommend the documentary The Story Of Plastic to get an insight on recycling in general.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. I used to be big on trying to reduce my plastic usage, but I gave up on it because the more I got aware of how f*'d up it all is, the more guilty and depressed I started to feel. It felt like fighting a hydra.
I've witnessed it myself: a lot of the waste that gets recycled by the consumer gets thrown on the same pile and goes in the same incinerator. It's not economically feasable to properly recycle plastics. It's all bs greenwashing.
I just stopped caring at some point and became a little more pessimistic about humanity. Sad really.
Plastic recycling is worse than useless: due to the filtration needs it's one of the larger contributors towards microplastics in the water supply. This is on top of all the other factors: any recycle-able plastics go in for another 1-2 rounds at most, and given the pace of plastic usage it means the recycling did not accomplish anything. Further, most plastic cannot be recycled, some 3rd party countries just dump it into the ocean, others just ship it to a landfill.
I'd be more rational to give up on most plastic recycling and just burn it industrially, like in waste power plants or to generate process heat. You get decent heat output, it burns fairly cleanly, and any toxins can be filtered. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than burning 'fresh' oil or gas for the same purpose while doing this whole plastic-recycling charade
I agree that a lot of plastic recycling is greenwashing from the manufacturing industry.
I've seen the statistics, and we need to take dramatic steps in order to reduce the amount of single use plastics – but don't you think that it's better that we try?
I hear you about micro plastics, and I think that it's important to try to do better to fix this.
But given the limitations of our imperfect world, do you really think that we would be net-net better off without even making an attempt to recycle it?
>But given the limitations of our imperfect world, do you really think that we would be net-net better off without even making an attempt to recycle it?
This really depends on the specifics of how much we can move the needle. For instance, there's zero chance we're fully getting rid of plastics. Even in a world where we had perfect political will, you'd need them at a minimum for medical tools.
With regard to microplastic pollution, I think I'd need more information on the major causes. For instance, I've heard that car tires are one of the biggest causes on land, whereas fishing nets are one of the biggest causes in the ocean. To the extent that this is correct, recycling is not going to impact those problems one way or another. If for instance I were to learn that microplastic pollution from recycling was so minimal it can barely be measured, I would be open to changing my position. (my understanding that plastic recycling is a significant cause of microplastic pollution.)
I've rambled a bit here, but ultimately the question needs to be answered whether plastic recycling is doing more harm than good. If it's doing more harm then it makes no sense to "at least try," as "success" would put us in a worse position.
I've always assumed we'll end up re-processing landfills when it hits an economic tipping point: better tech emerges, raw sources are exhausted, etc.
There's a story in Junkyard Planet of this exact thing making someone wealthy when a product that was treated as waste became valuable to the steel industry, and they knew where to find it in the dump.
I wonder this too, eventually robots will pick apart the landfills once there is technology to deal with it. Tons of metal goes into landfills that could go to scrap yards, etc Altho when they cap off landfills they become a ski resort or a subvision.
The recycling fantasy and forever increasing plastic production go hand in hand together.
This. I support recycling, but it is an absolute wasted endeavor so long as we continue to produce and dump plastic. No amount of recycling can hold a candle to the damage being done by the inability to recycle plastic, the insane production of new plastic, and the disposable of all of that plastic.
Until we learn to do something with the plastic, recycling is just a pipe dream to make people feel better.
It would to interesting to compare the "virtuous" reasons offered in these comments for hating recycling with USA vs EU (or other high Vs low recycling areas, like countries or states).
Does the USA or Missisippi have the lower recycling rate because they are uniquely immune to the corporate oil lobby that scammed Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium?
Is it because they instead reduce their consumption and reuse their empty containers unlike the lazy Belgians who are too addicted to feeling virtuous? Has the EU plastic use risen more than in America, because of recycling?
This is a marketing press release about two industries that are not particularly trustworthy in their claims. I would not out any stock in any assertion made within.
Using expensive and wasteful AI to pretend plastic recycling is meaningful... this is marketing nonsense.
Ah, the myth of recycling.
I wonder what the next recycling movement will be? Discarded EV batteries? Dead solar panels?
How does this next iteration play out?
Both of those are extremely recyclable and have more manageable separation problems. There's not much of a solar recycling industry because the panels generally have longer lifetimes than the minimum advertised - they last until weather damage.
(the thin film ones are a separate category, some of which contain more poisonous materials, but fortunately they were never really economic)
There are hauling and processing fees that make this profitable. Its not a linear problem or opportunity.
Right. It has nothing to do with recycling and everything to do with dumping shit into the waters around India.
Solid plan.