Automated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as "automated quality control units". The mechanical and air systems do most of the separation; the robots just grab stuff that was mis-sorted by the other systems.
The main vision systems are now fast enough that sorters work by moving objects on a wide, fast belt where they go flying off the end. While in flight, multispectral cameras look at the objects, using both reflected and transmitted light, and within milliseconds trigger air jets to blow items in the desired direction. Most robotics videos from startups are sped up because the thing is so slow. The ones from commercially successful sorting companies are slowed down so you can see what's happening.
The problem is what to do with the sorted stuff. It's just not very valuable. It's possible to recycle plastic bottles all the way back to more plastic bottles. A huge plant near LA does this for most of southern California. States that charge a recycling fee for containers can handle it, but those that don't...
So they can sort things well. It means they can put them in a dump neatly. Most things that get put into recycling don’t make economic sense to recycle -except aluminum and some other metals.
Most plastics under cheap (but still uneconomic) recycling suffer from heat history and becomes less useful.
That’s where the reduce/reuse part of the old term comes into play. Recycling was never meant to be the end-all solution. We need to reduce use of waste that is NOT easily recycled (plastics) and focus on using materials that are (metals, glass)
Quite. Recycling was supposed to catch the little we couldn't reuse. When recycling points first started cropping up it was still common to return glass bottles for refill, and get a deposit back.
As recycling has grown, reuse has almost completely died out, and one time plastic has replaced most of those former deposit-return items.
There is quite interesting Israeli startup Ubq[1] claiming it can recycle [2] greasy plastics into the material usable for further plastics manufacturing.
It’s not hard to come up with a process that can recycle anything organic into any petrochemical via Fischer Tropsch. What’s difficult is doing it economically.
I was part of a software project for BHS several years ago. We were taking the cad models for a entire plant and rendering them in the web with info/marketing media for each module.
The speed that they could sort material at different stages was incredible. I don't remember seeing a single "robotic arm" picking anything. It was all air and mechanical sorting. Very cool stuff.
They should have videos of most their modules on their site for the curious.
The first recycling robot was installed only three years ago.[1] There's been considerable progress since then. BHS is now installing and reselling the MAX-AI robotic picker, which seems to be a recent addition to their product line. This is out of the experimental stage and in use at high-volume sites. Expensive up front, about $200K each and $160K for installation and integration. Each one replaces about 2 people, plus the robots can run 2 or 3 shifts, so payback time is maybe 3 years.
There are some VC-funded companies in this area, but the vision/AI part is pretty much solved. It's getting the mechanical systems to be robust enough in a very dirty environment that's hard.
The big insight is that most of the separation has to be done by cheaper processes operating on the bulk material stream. The robotic system is just to pull out stuff that didn't get sorted correctly by screens, drums, shakers, magnets, blowers, and vision-based air jet sorters. An all-robot system is too slow and too expensive, but quality control robots for getting from 5% contamination to 0.5% contamination are cost-effective. Here's a good video of the whole process.[2] 70 tons an hour.
That makes it possible to get contamination levels down to China's new standards and the ones of US plants which can use the stuff. "Because of China's voracious appetite for all types of U.S. scrap exports over the past 20 years, MRFs "had the luxury of being able to sell the mixed rigid plastics [and] mixed paper without a lot of sorting and quality control." ... "Some materials are up in price … PET is actually increasing. It's a supply and demand thing," Butler said. "For the most part, if you can separate that material, there are domestic markets for that right now."[3]
So, in the recycling industry, some are whining about China's policies and others are fixing the problem, shipping products, and making money. It's small and medium sized cities that can't keep up. The big cities have big plants with multiple 70 ton per hour processing lines with the machinery running 2 shifts a day, and direct deals with companies that can use the plastics, metals, etc. A small town doesn't generate enough recycling to do that, and trucking unsorted material long distances is too expensive.
Very insightful and cool to hear about new tech making it into the MRFs. I was impressed back in~2014 so I bet there are way neater techniques now days.
Mechanical sorting (like shoe sorters) is very effective for discrete objects. Really cool to see stuff flying down a belt at 20mph+, get scanned/imaged from all sides, then thrown down one of 50 chutes without stopping.
That random junk ends up being sorted out and thrown away. There are some particular things that cause recycling spoilage, but random junk generally does not.
Even some metals have to be sorted. For example, you don't want to mix some different aluminum alloys, since the presence of some alloying elements precludes some uses of the recycled metal.
Personally, I'm happy that personal recycling hit a bump when China rejected dirty channels.
It was marketed in the 80s-00s as more of a panacea than it is, and specifically seems to have inculcated a dangerously willful ignorance of further action. I.e. "I already do the recycling thing, so I do my part."
From why I can tell, the toxicity, micro-plastic, and energy concerns are the primary mass-scale benefits? In that order?
The majority of which could be reaped at scale by funding toxic material collection programs, mandating less toxic material choices, and re-instituting a bottle tax+.
In return, we've let major, industrial-scale environmental catastrophes go unmitigated, because out of sight, out of mind.
From my reading, the 1970s push for recycling was always predicated as a vanguard movement, intended to educate the populace at large about environmental issues.
The expectation was that we would then pivot to tackle more difficult problems.
Instead, we have 50 years of patting ourselves on the back for hauling cardboard out to our suburban recycling containers.
+ Looking at you, Coke and Pepsi, for fighting bottle taxes around the world.
> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.
In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, although they won't give you your deposit - which seems like a very fair deal to me.
The one odd exception is milk. A classic example of American container reuse, but I don't see any milk sold in glass in Germany.
These bottles are sold at Spar, Aldi (Hofer) and many others.
However they don't have Pfand and are not reused at the moment [1]. At least not comercially. They make great containers for sugar or flour. According to the source they will start the reusing "beginning 2020".
This used to exist, and was even fairly common, in many countries. Moreover it was brought to your door by the milkman. And that milkman sometimes also had eggs and even vegetables from local farmers. This disappeared, driven by economics/capitalism/'supermarket=freedom'/..., not because it's bad per se. In fact there's quite some benefits to that whole system from an ecological point of view.
Which leads to sort of funny situations: locally it's been about 20 years since the milkman made his last round. Now there's again a company starting to do a similar thing (bring bottled milk/juice, local farmer's products to your door weekly) and some people who don't know better consider it revolutionary, and the poor company can't keep up with demand :)
It looks like the bottles rub against each other at that point, and it indicates the bottle is old/has been used a bunch of times. Is there a German word for it?
That movie was the first time I learned about "milkman" being a job. We had glass bottles that we filled ourselves at a self-service station that a farm just outside the city set up.
The current German system is nothing compared to the former East German bottle reuse system. Disclaimer: I grew up in East Germany, and during a summer break when I still was at school I worked in a small local brewery in the bottling facility at various machines for a few weeks, seeing the system in action.
In East Germany we only had very few bottle designs that were used throughout the entire country and all firms filling something in bottles used those designs. You could return a bottle filled with beer in the north of the country by one company and return it in the south and refill it with lemonade.
When I worked in the brewery we had trucks carrying returned glass bottles coming in, several per day. The labels on those bottles did not matter at all, only the form of the bottle did. They were sent through the washing machine, followed by a visual inspection station (today that would be automated, back then somebody had to sit there and watch endless streams of bottles pass in front of a bright white light source).
New bottles were fed into this system maybe 5% of the total nr. of bottles, maximum. The bulk of the bottles we filled had just been collected from all other the "Kreis" (county) that or the previous day.
There was slightly more variety for bottles with spirits, but non-alcoholic beverages and beer all had a handful of generic designs only:
The current German system has all kinds of bottles and LOTS of restrictions. The labels have to match, I cannot return bottles unless the shop sells these exact bottles (including the brand). There were no restrictions in the GDR and only very few designs to deal with. There also were no plastic bottles and cans, or if we had any they were too few for me to even remember. Sure, that last one is confounded by time, there were not that many in the West in the 1980s either.
There are no restrictions to returning in larger supermarkets, or the so called "Vollsortimenter" like Edeka, Rewe. Even Aldi(Nord) and Netto take everything. In fact, the only one being picky is Penny and Lidl. Maybe it's a regional thing?
Or a function of size like upwards of XXX sqaure meters shopping space you are forced to take in everything?
For one-way returns (= stuff that's shredded locally and recycled as materials) stores over 200 m² have to take everything, but for reused bottles there is no such law.
That was the case across the USSR. Really impressive reuse of glass bottles. Nowadays even the cheapest food comes in glass jars, not sure how that came to be. Nothing seems to be reused...
Unfortunately bottle shapes and designs are often seen as part of a brand identity, so any attempt to introduce standardized containers will be fought tooth and nail.
That sounds exactly like the current German system for beer bottles (although the range of beer bottle shapes has increased, so it's not as efficient anymore).
No, it is not the same at all! We now have a lot of restrictions on what can be returned to what store. They have to sell those exact bottles. For the automated plastic return stations you even have to have the label still on the bottle - if the label doesn't match, even if the actual bottle is exactly the same, the machine does not accept the return. You can't return everything anywhere.
In East Germany it worked for all bottles too, not just for beer bottles. The brewery where I worked also bottled various non-alcoholic drinks, suing the exact same bottles for all. The switch from one liquid to another didn't take long and was quickly performed, just restack different labels, flush the previous liquid, then restart the bottling with little overall delay. The bottles already in the queue remained the same.
If only three plastics were used in packaging -- say, polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate and polycarbonate -- recycling would be much easier. If they're clean and well separated, they can just be reused. Iffy polyethylene makes great "lumber" for decks, or roofing tiles. Iffy polyethylene terephthalate is great for fleece. Iffy polycarbonate plus carbon black is great for structural applications.
PLA is pretty awesome as far as recycling goes. Also I’m under the impression that cellophane (the “plastic” used for food packaging) is digestible by earthworms. I’m not sure restricting things like that makes sense.
And I'm reminded of a frightening experience. So I'm home after a night of dancing with friends. And I notice a burn hole in the back of my wool sweater. Some jerk with a lighter, I'm sure. But it could have been very bad, if I had been wearing PET fleece.
This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about what to do with wastes of the products sold?
The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.
The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
> The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.
The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.
Oil supply is effectively infinite. By that I mean there is so much available that we will have destroyed the planet before we remove it all. We extract as much as there is a demand for. If you lower the demand then you lower the amount being extracted
Shell’s new US-based plant [1] is expected to pump half a million cars worth of CO2 exhaust into the air a year. I haven’t seen any data suggesting that plastics production reduces the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I'm not sure are you serious about not seeing landfill connection with environmental problems or just being sarcastic.
If landfills are not such a problem, why "developed" countries (I won't name them but we know who they are) are exporting junk to China, India and Africa? Why simply not set landfills near popular cities so we can all enjoy the beauty of "low environmental issue" problems ;)
These days there is more trust in corrupted media than plain logic.
The reason governments waste time on recycling, or fail to authorize landfills, or orchestrate the export of trash to other countries is because environmentalists exist and are very active. They're especially powerful in rich countries – in fact, environmentalism seems to be a function of affluence. Affluence looks like a necessary but not sufficient condition, loosely speaking.
Your information is incorrect. No countries are exporting junk, rather some countries buy recycling in order to profitably use it.
And those developed countries were willing to sell it.
And yes those developed countries do in fact have landfills and they use them. there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.
Landfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and turned into parks.
Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned. RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps. Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since 2000, even despite population increases.
Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at scale.
There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."
Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that have emerged from the last several decades of focused study.
Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of uncontrolled municipal dumps.
Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
> leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill
A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the risks to their kids' safety.
The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go into the field to poison people.
If anything, experience from the past gave the people running these things suggestions where they can most likely cut costs without the whole thing blowing up into their faces before they retire. Same with monitoring. It's costly, nothing happened the last couple years, let's just do it less thoroughly.
Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory. In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement, dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid corrosion and now they have to get that shit out again, but thankfully the tax payer cover that bullshit. Another example? 737 MAX. Yet again a story of a company that kept cutting costs over years and years until it blew up in their faces. It ticked pretty much all the boxes over the year. Cutting corners, saving costs, budget restrictions, ignoring concerns by engineers in charge, you name it.
It's always the same pattern. If Apple doesn't innovate, cheaps out on components, scraps QA, their products might eventually suck so much that nobody will buy them anymore and they'll just disappear, but who cares. Nuclear isn't bad. Aviation isn't bad. Landfills aren't. But these are these kinds of industries where negligence can have catastrophic results. And especially something that is as long term as a landfill is predestined for this kind of failure.
Landfills replacement a tiny volume and can be mined long term. It’s mostly organic matter that’s going to turn into coal and oil eventually but there plenty of more useful elements like copper in the mix.
I'm continually amazed at how popular the concept of mining landfills for resources is in this forum, while at the same time recycling is regularly dismissed as wishful thinking.
Perhaps it just needs rebranded as pre-emptive landfill mining?
Many forms of post consumer recycling are not worth it today with both streams often ending in the same landfills. That’s the only objection I have to recycling.
But, in a thousand or even a million years the atoms will still be around. Basically we may find this stuff useless, but that does not mean it’s permanently devoid of value. If nothing else archeology often involves going through trash heaps from ages past.
Until someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.
That doesn’t make chemical sense. There is a huge energetic cost to smelting ore to remove the oxides, vs. landfill material that is exactly what you need but just needs to be sorted and cleaned.
The concentrations of valuable materials in the landfill are minuscule. It doesn't make energy sense to sort it even though the fractions are relatively ready to use.
Actually, no. You might say this about metals, for example, but nature does not produce the sort of high-energy low-information hydrocarbon chains that comprise nearly all plastics. Inserting massive quantities of manmade endocrine disruptors into the earth is massively disruptive.
I'd guess many environmental issues are connected. Rethinking how we produce and consume should lead to solutions that both reduce waste and save energy. Having to deal with the trash ourselves for a bit might put some incentive to consider waste while designing products and supply chains.
A meta study of papers doing lifecycle cost analysis of the options shows that on several metrics, including climate change reduction, landfill is worse than both incineration and recycling for a broad range of materials. This is why almost every functional government in the world legislates accordingly.
This is partly due to the energy cost of new vs recycled so somewhat ironically landfill becomes a slightly better option as the grid becomes more renewable, though unlikely to pull ahead of recycling, since it also takes energy that would be getting cleaner.
i very, very much doubt that said study existed at the time these decisions were made.
also the energy cost is a wash (or loss) for almost all but aluminum. glass would be fine but we are awash in glass, so AIUI cardboard and aluminum are the only consumer items worth recycling when consider energy and other input costs. i’ve no idea on total climate impact (eg greenhouse gas production) though and i don’t doubt you. i only doubt your assertion that governments made these decisions with that in mind.
A summary from the latter talking specifically about plastic (though the document covers other materials):
The results confirm that mechanical recycling is the best waste management option in respect of the climate change potential, depletion of natural resources and energy demand impacts. The analysis highlights again that these benefits of recycling are mainly achieved by avoiding production of virgin plastics.
The environmental benefits are maximised by collection of good quality material (to limit the rejected fraction)
and by replacement of virgin plastics on a high ratio (1 to 1).
Incineration with energy recovery performs poorly with respect to climate change impact
Landfill is confirmed as having the worst environmental impacts in the majority of cases.
As the UK moves to a lower-carbon energy mix, recycling will become increasingly favoured.
The first link is a "meta-analysis" where they only found three studies on point with wildly different methods that disagreed in their conclusions.
One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash.
They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three studies and picked the conclusions they liked best.
I think you've misread that, they only found three recent economic analysis of recycling that dealt purely with plastic. (Quite possibly because it makes no sense to set up a recycling system for just one output, since the additional cost once you've started is minimal)
They also found 20 papers that dealt with the climate change emissions and total energy use and ranked them on those factors as well.
The comment I replied to specifically said that we shouldn't worry about landfill space as we have more important issues like climate change, so that's 95% of studies found suggesting that opinion isn't based on facts and that landfill would be a worse option than recycling plastic for greenhouse gas emissions, which we've agreed is a serious problem. (And landfill broadly tied with burning it for energy on greenhouse gas emissions with different assumptions giving different answers).
To your point about total energy use, landfill comes out worst consistently and recycling best.
You could make the leap and assume the process that uses the least energy and releases the least greenhouse gases is also the least expensive economically (if you account for externalities) but that's a bonus on top of providing useful information that could change opinions related to greenhouse gas emissions.
You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts, yet the facts now support their decision, while your stated beliefs about energy usage are contradicted by the science.
Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation? Where does your belief that it was ever considered likely to be a counterproductive activity come from? Did they convince you of anything else, like solar panels not making sense or EVs being worse for the environment, or wind turbines boondoggles? All those were similarly supported by effective government support programs and repaid the investment greatly.
Important points to consider, I'm open to updating my views here.
> You seem to doubt that governments made decisions based on facts,
It's actually the reverse, I've become more skeptical because so many recycling programs are now just landfilling plastic because the costs no longer justify recycling it.
The price of oil should tell us something about the relative efficiency of recycling plastic. It would be weird if there was zero relation.
Oil prices being consistently low for a decade probably contribute to shifting efficiencies here.
I worry more generally about reuse and recycle heuristics since early environmental impact studies showed they frequently produce bad results. But that doesn't mean they always do.
Maybe you're right and those input factors haven't changed enough to affect the total cost math.
> Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation?
It is not. the paper you cited (thank you) was written in 2017. But more to the point, governments don’t work that way.
If in fact the reason for recycling is environmental benefit, we (USA anyway) would not be in the situation where we are putting plastics back in landfills, and we would not have been in the prior situation where we dump plastic and ewaste to other countries with no oversight whatsoever on what happens to it once it leaves our shores. the environmental impact is the same, here or there.
> Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
Let me guess you're American, where free space is plenty? In most of Europe, space is constrained and about half the EU has banned ordinary landfills for that reason.
Also, landfills are an inherent danger to their surroundings in case the bottom barrier breaks and fluids seep into groundwater or that more-or-less uncontrollable fires break out.
You are massively underestimating the environmental impacts. Every form of plastic in widespread use has been found to be a significant endocrine disruptor. The rate of plastic waste has followed an exponential curve similar to emissions. Plastics are likely on the same order of magnitude as climate change and deforestation in terms of the long-term impact on species extinction (and to human health, if that is of greater concern).
Sweden just burns it cleanly. I don't have any anxiety over the single-use plastic I use, just frustration that we worry too much about what to do with it. Now the Pacific trash island is another story...
Yes. When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the landfill. A properly managed landfill is a perfectly responsible way to dispose of plastic. Get the oil from the ground, make it into useful things, then put it back when we're done.
Maybe I'm just and old gnarly dude, maybe I focus on the bad parts of society too much, but I don't trust the people running these kinds of things enough. At the end of the day it's still capitalism, you might be budget restricted, you want to pay yourself a bigger bonus, whatever. I don't trust that even just the majority of landfills are constructed to contain the waste long enough. And what incentive should you have to build them that way? It's enough if they hold up until you retire from your management position. Maybe if you have some sort of moral values you might think of your grandchildren and add a couple years. But after that, who cares. Long gone, somebody else's problem.
That article says that 99% of waste is recycled in Sweden, but also points out that a large part of that is incinerated. I don't really understand how incineration can be called recycling. The cycle literally ends at that point.
That's not to say it's better than many alternatives (the article claims it's better than most landfills), but let's call it what it is.
If you replace an oil-fired power plant with an incineration plant you save oil that you can now use to make high quality plastic. If you squint hard enough that is recycling trash to oil.
Of course oil-fired power plants aren't really used anymore (at grid scale), so it's more like recycling trash into coal or natural gas.
The fact that incinerating trash may lead to using slightly oil is not recycling. Just like driving your car more slowly to increase its efficiency is not recycling. I don't remotely understand your reasoning.
> As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89% since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to all countries were down 64% in that time period, while mixed paper exports were down 42% according to ISRI.
The article doesn't clearly explain why the shift has happened. It does point out:
> ... China ... wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard.
And later:
> China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable junk stateside.
Have wages in China really risen so quickly that human garbage sorters are now too expensive? That seems unlikely, and the article gives no evidence for it.
An alternative explanation might be that the plastic was never recycled in the first place. It's more than just sorting. Each container has a residue of liquid/solid stuff that can't possibly be compatible with low-cost material recycling.
What if the material received by China was actually burned instead to generate energy rather than new containers? That might explain the newfound reluctance of China to take the stuff.
Another anecdote, but I was in Shanghai last month and they recently started an initiative to sort trash/recyclables much more strictly. The people I was staying with were telling me that they could be fined if they don't properly sort their trash.
If China were to burn all recyclables in a manner consistent with the rest of their industrialization, the process probably wasn’t very clean.
China could invest in cleaner recycling processes, but a quick way to reduce a problem is to reduce its scope, and banning imports of recyclable material is certainly a quick way to do that, everyone else be damned.
(I don’t really think China burnt all of it, but if they did and stopped this would be why.)
Its the industries and businesses with the plastic addiction problem, not the consumer.
This is similar to making a bad long-term bet and having to pay up. There are a lot of other attractive choices to plastic, but the window to transition seemlessly appears to be closing more and more each week.
Seeing the death of coal should give them a map to follow. They made a bad bet on the future too.
it’s a tragedy of the commons problem. plastic is essentially free, so once one manufacturer can make the same consumer quality product with plastic instead of [whatever else], it forces the hands of all other manufacturers.
The simple solution is to move the disposal cost to the producer. Instead of the consumer paying taxes to dispose of the product, the producer must pay and now a producer which produces less waste can sell cheaper products.
There is such a system in Germany, called Grüner Punkt or Duales System. They tax manufacturers' packaging and run the collection and recycling from that tax income.
Imho it didn't help all that much. I did not find numbers for the reduction in packaging, but my impresssion is "none". As for recycling the waste they collect, there are numbers between "half is just icinerated" and "only 5% is recycled": https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duales_System_(Abfallwirtsch...
More and more I'm starting to think that people must be responsible for their entire trash output. Every thing you buy, from food to electronics to cars and even houses, you are responsible for: food scraps, packaging, recyclable materials, e-waste, old appliances, scrap vehicles, etc.
You are are responsible for having near-zero footprint in your life, where this number should be universal for rich and poor alike. You must bear whatever effort or cost to live within this footprint. You must make choices to not acquire things that will become trash and you must take steps to ensure what you need to dispose of goes into proper channels. You will probably want collective solutions to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. You also need regulations to handle compliance and governments to ensure the fair application thereof. Yes, this is an expensive ideal, yet the opposite seems hard to justify morally.
Current modern life is using fossil energy, natural resources, and land area on Earth to live a life of ease and deferred responsibility. Just because there is still space to make landfills and air/soil not yet saturated with pollutants, what right do we have to take it?
The way this might be similar to CO2 "waste" is an exercise left to the reader.
I'm trying to figure out if it still makes sense to sort out the plastics before burying them. Make dedicated plastic landfills separate from all the other rubbish. Then when we find an efficient way to reuse it we will know where in the ground a ton of it is rather than having to open a mixed rubbish fill land fill then clean and process ALL the garbage to sort the plastic out. Seems to me that presorting before burying is a better use of energy and resources.
If sorting technology gets better over time, why even bother presorting before burying? It would be cheaper to bury and them sort in the future. Maybe conventional landfills, with adequate attention paid to leak prevention, were the smartest solution all along.
Planning on uncapping the landfill in the future restricts what you can put on top of it in the meantime. Whether or not that's really an issue probably depends on how much free space your country has laying around.
Because you'd have to open and move a bunch more junk to sort. Meaning more energy to dig up, move, and sort. Presorting makes more sense to me, we are also in the habit already to separate certainly materials from rubbish (food waste, non recyclables, etc.)
Damn, I hate those two paragraph articles. Damn lazy writers.
Edit: This is all that Firefox Reader View shows. No explanation. Just this:
> Recycling Rethink: What to Do With Trash Now That China Won’t Take It
> Saabira Chaudhuri
> 1 minute
> For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.
> That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and...
Another edit: I would subscribe, if I could. I mean, just 1 EUR per quarter. But they want a credit card, and Mirimir has no credit cards. And expecting me to trust their discretion, if I shared my meatspace identity, would be foolish. But even trying for anonymous credit cards violates KYC law, and isn't worth the risk just to read WSJ.
There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%.
If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket.
And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.
Or the entity that makes the trash should pay for it. That would reduce the amount of packaging that is made by forcing the cost on the producer. If I'm going to be forced to live in a supply side economy, then the supply side should pay the taxes.
The same is true for the huge numbers of empty Walmarts throughout the US. We should have made them escrow demolition costs at the time the building was made.
If you put the costs at the very end then all of the trash will still be produced, but nobody could throw it away. Our entire society saves production and reduces waste if you punish the producers of that waste instead.
Easy by what possible metric. Even if you did do this in someplace all you'd get is a bunch of pissed off locals who get rid of those ordinances. Any anti-wasteful packaging strategy would have to go after the businesses producing these products by hiking taxes on them. Which we could easily do in the US if we had something like a comprehensive tiered VAT instead of the nightmarish sales tax system we've got instead.
In my view, we should be building more effective landfilling infrastructure and stop telling people that putting their garbage in the yellow bin is somehow better or more moral or environmentally friendly. We have plenty of land that can be used to sequester waste, the issue here is people have been tricked for years into thinking that recycling is better or somehow good for the environment while ignoring the effects of energy intensive recycling plants and waste incineration because it's a feel good talking point.
Plastic you throw in the recycling either gets burned or sent somewhere it might be processed and apparently end up free in the environment. We should just be sticking it in the ground until we can enact policies to limit waste.
I don't understand how that is really that easy. I personally don't know of anywhere (at least in the US) that measures the trash output of individual homes. So all existing curbside trash pickup infrastructure would need to be overhauled to implement measurement at the time of collection. Additionally, since trash pickup is handled by municipal / city governments currently, a new system needs to be put in place to provide oversight / enforcement of measurement & fees. The startup cost here would be enormous.
Also, this doesn't even take into account apartment buildings where individuals dump their trash into trash cutes / shared bins / etc. You would essentially need to retrofit every apartment building with a collection system capable of calculating individual output, or charge all residents of each building equally.
The economy is already massively skewed against low income people; they’re already “gouged” in a dozen other ways. The solution for that is UBI, not giving up on the environment.
There are countless ways to improve the situation for the poor from being gouged in countless other ways. Telling the environment to fuck off isn’t among the more sensible ones.
You flipped the consequent. I'm not suggesting we should tell the environment off, I'm suggesting we shouldn't solve our issues by charging the poor a 1000% markup they can't afford. I also think it's unethical to fix world hunger by eating children for what it's worth, as convenient as that might be.
Bighead thought: Can't we just melt everything down to a big soup and suck out the different fractions/layers and then further chemically and/or mechanically separate all the stuff that sticks together?
The main vision systems are now fast enough that sorters work by moving objects on a wide, fast belt where they go flying off the end. While in flight, multispectral cameras look at the objects, using both reflected and transmitted light, and within milliseconds trigger air jets to blow items in the desired direction. Most robotics videos from startups are sped up because the thing is so slow. The ones from commercially successful sorting companies are slowed down so you can see what's happening.
The problem is what to do with the sorted stuff. It's just not very valuable. It's possible to recycle plastic bottles all the way back to more plastic bottles. A huge plant near LA does this for most of southern California. States that charge a recycling fee for containers can handle it, but those that don't...