I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
If you're playing video games you're literally not doing nothing. The point is to give yourself time to reflect and breathe. If you're stoned and that makes it easy to meditate for ages, you could probably count that as doing nothing. Although you should probably worry if you simply cannot sit still for any significant amount of time without being stoned. But yeah if you're getting stoned and like watching movies and stuffing your face then you're not doing nothing.
But that kid in your example isn't doing _nothing_, they are playing video games. That is entirely different from consciously pausing and doing nothing.
That kid is doing nothing with their life, there’s a difference between that and a nornal persob’s downtime that makes sure we don’t task out with some goal that feels like doing nothing but it’s got some agenda: no planned activity!
I don't think its the builders. I think its the red tape and bureaucracy. Every agency wants to opine and get their pound of flesh. Also its nearly impossible to even get cleared to bid on these contracts.
Should some people be able to drive recklessly just because they can't afford to pay speeding tickets? I don't see what problem this is trying to solve. Is there an epidemic of wealthy people speeding and running over school children? In America you get points for speeding and your insurance goes up (more expensive car, more expensive insurance) and after a number of points you lose your license.
Wealthy people don't break the law any more than less wealthy people even though the naive view of the economic costs of crime would have you think they would.
I think the law should apply equally to all. That means you don't give special breaks or come down especially hard on someone just because of their economic circumstances.
The funny thing about this opinion is that it is both extremely widely shared and extremely unpopular, depending on the context. Just seems invasive to me for a court to demand your personal monetary situation when determining how much to punish you.
The flip side to this is no-cash bail and people being allowed back on the streets after committing awful anti-social crimes. In NYC some people get released on no cash bail for 2nd degree manslaughter. But you know, economic circumstances
The law should have the same consequences for everyone. $1M fine for you is likely making you bankrupt, but is a rounding error for Elon. Is that the same consequence?
If fines don't scale with wealth, they mean the activity is only illegal for the poor & middle class.
So in principle, different rules for different people? If you have no money you should be able to break the law more cheaply?
Principles are principles for a reason. You don't hold equal treatment / punishment under the law as a principle. Equal does not mean relative to something.
> If you have no money you should be able to break the law more cheaply?
Yes, the total value of the fine is less for someone with no money, but has the same impact the same because it is the same portion of their overall income.
Just like "if you have no money, you should be able to live in country more cheaply by paying less in taxes".
And realistically poor will always have more impact due to any fine. As they have almost always both in relative and absolute terms less disposable income. It is not like taking 9 million from someone on net earning 10 million will make them starve, but try to do same with someone making 20k and taking 18k from that...
It's the same rule, the calculation is just different.
Imagine it were prison. Should we say that a rich person should get a 1 day sentence and a poor person should get a 1 year sentence simply because the rich person's time is worth more?
Terrible example since equality would mean they both get N day sentence as I'm advocating keeping the fee fixed regardless of circumstances. Here is how the example would actually work:
A 20 year old probably has 60 years left. Spending a year in prison for a 20 year old is only 1/60th his expected life span. But for a 50 year old it would be 1/30th his life span. So perhaps the young person should get a harsher penalty.
We already kinda do this, old people get let out of prison if they're ill, etc.
I don't really think my example is terrible, I think it depends on what you think of as "equal". If the idea is to disincentivize an action, it needs to have a similar amount of pain to all people, presumably.
The word "equality" is underdetermined here. To me, it is obvious that scaling fines with income (so everyone gets 1/500th of their annual wage for a speeding ticket, e.g.) is equality and that flat fine amounts, being a larger burden on the poor, are unequal. Apparently you don't agree, but that means we need to sit down and hash out an agreed-on definition of equality first, not go slinging around emotive rhetoric.
Thousands of people die in car related situations. Most of them are preventable if people would just drive they are told in drivers ed. Don't tailgate is a big on as it means when (not if!) someone makes a mistake there is enough time and space to take evasive action. Many other safety laws exist that people think nothing of violating.
> Just seems invasive to me for a court to demand your personal monetary situation when determining how much to punish you.
What if the default punishment was instead a nice, equitable 21 days in jail for rich and poor alike, with the option to instead pay a fine of 21 days income, if you were willing to disclose your income?
The equality is that the fine is for hours of your life it takes to pay that fine. If you make $20/hr and the fine is $100, that's 5 hours of work that you could use to pay for whatever, that you have to use to pay the ticket. If you make $200/hr, then the fine is $1,000, also 5 hours of your life. That's where the equality is. No matter who you are, violating this thing costs, in this example, 5 hours of work.
> That’s why, to better contextualize the nation’s great fortunes, in 2014 Forbes began assigning each billionaire a self-made score. The score ranges from 1 to 10, with 1 to 5 meaning an individual inherited most of his or her wealth and 6 to 10 meaning he or she built their company or established their fortune. In 1984, less than half the people on The Forbes 400 were self-made; in 2023, 70% have created their own riches.
> In all, around 30% of this year’s Forbes 400 members inherited their vast sums. That ranges from those scoring a lowly 1, who inherited all their fortune and are not actively working to increase it, to those scoring a 5, who inherited a successful business but set about turning it into a huge success.
The thing with inherited wealth is that it doesn't grow and gets dispersed. As the saying goes:
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
The wealthiest on the margin are absolutely productive or at least good allocators
My issue with AI safety is that it's an overloaded term. It could mean anything from an llm giving you instructions on how to make an atomic bomb to writing spicy jokes if you prompt it to do so. it's not clear which safety these regulatory agencies would be solving for.
But I'm worried this will be used to shape acceptable discourse as people are increasingly using LLMs as a kind of database of knowledge. It is telling that the largest players are eager to comply which suggests that they feel they're in the club and the regulations will effectively be a moat.
> My issue with AI safety is that it's an overloaded term. It could mean anything from an llm giving you instructions on how to make an atomic bomb to writing spicy jokes if you prompt it to do so. it's not clear which safety these regulatory agencies would be solving for.
I think if you look at the background of the people leading evaluations at the US AISI [1], as well as the existing work on evaluations by the UK AISI [2] and METR [3], you will notice that it's much more the former than the latter.
Anyone who really wants to make an atomic bomb already knows how to make an atomic bomb. The limitations are in access to raw materials and ability to do large scale enrichment.
I agree. I’m really more concerned about bioweapons, for which it’s generally understood (in security studies) that access to technical expertise is the limiting factor for terrorists. See Al Qaeda’s attempts to develop bio weapons in 2001.
Coming soon (I’m certain) is the ability for consumer-accessible LLMs and their ilk to analyze millions upon millions of pages of documents. That poses what Pentagon types no doubt perceive as a national security risk.
Which makes me worry about "safe" from which perspective? Does it make government officials safe from second-guessing? That's certainly against the public good, but there are many ideologies that begin with the premise that what's good for the official government "narrative" is good for the public.
Because returning to the user what is requested is considered an 'attack' I forsee an endless list of 'vulnerabilities' until the model is lobotomized to the point of uselessness.
Can somebody put together a law suit where LLM regulations can be argued as a first amendment violation? The powers that be are trying to indirectly regulate speech here
This. Knowledge can't be made illegal. Neither can speech. People have to grasp that tyranny is not an aberration of defective minds but a natural impulse of highly intelligent people. It's strategy to maximize their power, prosperity and security at the expense of every other value and every other person. Good for them while they live and bad for everyone else at every other time frame.
Currently? I don't think so. There are no binding US regulations at all. These companies are voluntarily working with NIST (and why not, free labour. Also the potential to influence any future regulations).
In the future... I suppose it depends on what regulations they pass.
> Another option is to put it to beneficial use to create heat or even electricity. The Puente Hills landfill I showed earlier has a gas-to-energy facility that’s been running since 1987, and even though the landfill is now closed, it currently provides enough electricity to power around 70,000 homes.
And towards the end
> Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water. It’s not possible to landfill waste everywhere... But my point is: landfills are a surprisingly low-impact way to manage solid waste in a lot of cases. I hope the future is a utopia where all the stuff we make maintains its beneficial value forever, but for now, I am thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to.
I love reading about landfills. I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.
I genuinely use landfills, especially with plastic waste, as shibboleth to know whether I'm talking to somebody who is an environmentalist or somebody who is an "environmentalist."
Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.
Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.
> Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change
This is not axiomatic. The gases from the incineration can be put into productive use (cf. Vienna heating and providing hot water off of their incinerator), and the harmful stuff can be filtered (cf. Vienna where the incinerator is in a dense urban area, and an architectural masterpiece).
Yes they exist and they work. However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution.
If it is ok to blow out the toxic smoke the high end solution will not be built.
The best thing is still avoiding waste.
> However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution
In the US, the EPA has had regulations around this since the late 70's; it's a cost of doing business at this point, not a wild new theoretical rule framework.
It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.
I'll pitch in. Standardize on a strict set of allowed mixtures of plastics (and possibly even colors!). Not just "PP", "ABS" and so on, but exact formulas.
Also, keep the set of allowed formules small.
This will serve two purposes, first, allow plastics to be actually recycled to a greater extent. Now, plastics are very much "mystery" items.
Second, it will reduce the amount of harmful and toxic additives in plastics.
Somehow we also need to stop producing so much junk, electronics which is not durable, packing material within packing material and so on. The externalised costs of so many things are huge, we need to somehow de-externalise the costs.
Prohibit importing non-compliant goods. Do compliance checking in ports and punish local importers, both companies and their owners/executives, for noncompliance.
I don't think the political will to do this exists. From the perspective of the state we care way more about drugs than we do about plastics, but people have been ordering asthma drugs, psychedelics, stimulants, steroids, and retinoids from Indian pharmacies successfully for at least a decade now, which makes me think that it's a hard problem to solve at scale.
I don't think the political will exists do much of anything which is hard, definitely not to coördinate laws on plastics. But to compare import of stimulants to plastics... I don't think it's the same thing. Nobody is going to gray import a plastic toothbrush from China just to get that extra cadmium.
It comes down to the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. There's a reason Recycle is the last word in that mantra. It's the most expensive of the three things a person can do. The other two are about habits, and those really are things you have to just decide you want to change.
However what I couldn't find was how much overall waste consumers create vs other sources, just this:
And it seems to imply that consumer behavior has little direct effect on the overall amount of waste we humans produce. Like, how many people would have to stop drinking canned beverages to see a decrease in bauxite tailings? Probably an unrealistic amount.
Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan.
For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas.
Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive.
The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)
> Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.
Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched.
Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste.
Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not.
Europe is not densely populated. There is plenty of empty space, they just have decided to place rules on how that space is used.
The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.
How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to long term custodianship and management of things bad for people and the environment.
TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful physical matter that requires waste management? Default to destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now defaulted to success instead of failure.
The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the landfill (or incinerator) in the first place.
Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill space. But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill.
In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.
Certainly, you are generating some greenhouse gasses in the process, which is a trade off to ensure immediate waste destruction. To note, you will have to flare methane from the landfill in perpetuity when landfilled. If one is so inclined, internalize the cost of direct air carbon capture into the cost of waste disposal for those emissions.
> Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million homes’ energy use for one year. At the same time, methane emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource.
TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the human, pull forward the disposal.
While I might be wrong, I seriously doubt the plastics creating the methane emissions you are referring to. That is almost certainly the organic matter.
I have no idea how you think plasma gasification -- requiring extreme amounts of energy -- is in any way helpful to our current environmental concerns. Unless we somehow magically start relying on 100% renewables, it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.
Money. Landfills aren’t cheap to operate and burning also reduces transportation costs.
Incineration ends up being quite profitable in isolation. Take stuff worth negative X$ per ton and turn it into a smaller pile of stuff still worth negative X$ per ton. Generating power is a useful side effect, but not the main reason.
By the end of this year, the world will be deploying 660GW of solar annually. Within 18 months, that figure rises to 1TW/year (based on current manufacturing ramp trajectories).
On the contrary, I’m unsure how you think we don’t have the clean power for this, not even accounting for the power you can generate from the syngas that is a byproduct of the process. The process is not energy positive, but it’s also not wildly net negative due to the energy content of the matter being gasified.
> Plasma gasification uses around 800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power per ton of municipal solid waste (MSW).
Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve. We're burning obscene amounts of nat gas, petroleum, and even coal currently. Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.
> Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve.
Well, landfill management is something you could (mostly) only run whenever you have excess (solar) power on the grid. So it's an excellent consumer for intermittent generators.
Think when these plants would come online. Think when solar and storage will be up to speed on the grid. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Think in systems. To say no today because of current state today is irrational and ignores the data. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth within ~30-60 minutes to power all of humanity for a year, and an enormous global clean energy flywheel is coming up to speed (first solar, with batteries right behind).
I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational.
Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could get by asking the surgeon to do two things at once.
This is the difference between an environmentalist and an "environmentalist."
We need to fix climate change now. Get to carbon neutral now. Literally nothing else matters much.
It’s not human rationality, it’s cold, hard economics (scoped to renewables and storage uptake). Climate change is already happening, and there is nothing you can do to stop it immediately, just as you will get killed stepping in front of a freight train. You can only build systems that can attempt to outrace it to slow it down (various efforts to achieve net zero in a domain), and then eventually reverse it (an efficient, scalable carbon sequestration solution to existing atmospheric carbon load, powered by clean energy) over the next ~100-150 years.
A substantial portion of the duck curve problem is overproduction at no-peak hours. Plasma gasification can take that excess strain off the grid and put it to useful work, while even providing a by-product that you can burn in the event that all of your renewables are underperforming, reducing the risk of relying on renewables.
It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.
> Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.
That’s not realistic. You can and probably will have a complete excess of renewable energy on bright and windy days that is well beyond electrical demand, and at the same time rely on baseload power during still nights. Energy storage helps even things out, and plasma gasification is one possible way to store that energy.
Point taken. Though I do wonder how much of the methane released is from plastic decomposition and how much of it is from food/biomaterial decomposition. I'd naively assume the primary emission would come from readily decomposable materials and that most plastics would remain fairly stable for a lot longer than yesterday's half eaten hamburger.
Indeed, waste sorting might improve the situation, but all available evidence indicates there is no will to do this (caveats being parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics, and anywhere else diverse multi stream waste management can be effectively operated), which leads me to believe gasification is the superior path (with a bypass stream for glass, brick, earth, rock, and metals, primarily to prevent process efficiency reduction during gasification but also for reuse of those materials).
Hardly the best solution, but I argue the least worst solution. Landfilling is just too much risk considering leaching from lining failures (putting water tables and aquifers at risk from permanent contamination) and the lifetime of methane destruction that must be accounted for.
I'm generally down on sorting unless you have a lot of one particular type of waste. If you are not generating a full truck worth of that type of waste every week sorting efforts mean more trucks (since the truck with compartments for each type cannot hold as much waste because of the compartments, and also it has to go empty when one compartment fills). Combine that with the need verify the sorting was done correctly and it isn't worth it. We have made trade progress on automated sorting machines that solve a lot of problems - lets instead ban things that cannot be automatically sorted.
What has been successful in my city, Portland, is separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned as natural gas.
Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.
A wrinkle I read somewhere - organics in traditional landfills kept toxic materials like heavy metals "locked up", less risk of such stuff leeching out in the ground water.
Reads like it's worth than just straight up incineration. At least with current technologies. (Apart from perhaps the installation on that American military ship. Maybe. But that's just because they have unusual requirements.)
Interesting point I hadn't thought of! Had previously thought that obviously things should go straight in the ground to avoid CO2 emissions and hadn't thought about decomposition.
Not OP but long been intrigued by possibilities in this domain (ever since Changing World Technologies promised to, um, change the world -- not plasma based but same proposition).
I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.
“Recycling” sometimes (often) includes burning it in waste-to-energy incinerators, which emit CO2 and other pollutants just as if the original oil had been burned directly instead of taking a detour via a plastic product. It would be better to put waste plastic in a carbon storage device, a.k.a. a landfill. At least that way we are caching a little bit of easy-access fuel to help re-bootstrap civilization in case of global catastrophe.
1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot.
It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.
To self-checkout at my local grocery store, I have to clear a reminder that any soft plastic recycled through the store over the last x years was in fact not recycled and stockpiled around Australia in warehouses “waiting” for it to become economically feasible (it never did)
REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha
Ironically, just from this comment I get the impression that you are misinformed about environmental issues.
Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person.
But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy?
It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.
It was so frustrating when a dude at work was trying to bust my balls for not using the recycling for my plastic bottle. I didn’t have the energy or patience to explain to him how our city has single stream recycling and there was 100% chance that bottle was being shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean or something else way more stupid than just being buried in the city landfill.
Based on the single stream comment, I'm going to assume you're describing an experience in North America, and your assumptions are pretty off base for PET bottles.
Figure 1 in the linked paper gives the raw numbers for where PET bottles end up. [1]
Yep, I've worked in recycling for 6 years and am well aware that there's a lot of broken parts. My point was that if a PET bottle goes into a single stream system, the recycling industry is pretty good at capturing it, baling it, and selling it to a plastics processor. That processor will clean it, pellet it, and sell it as rPET. 85% of PET bottles that end up in curbside single stream end up getting recycled. I'd like that number higher, but it's where things are at the moment. Throw a bottle in the trash, it's getting landfilled/burned. Throw it in recycling, it's most likely getting recycled.
In Australia the whole hard VS soft plastic blew up recently. The REDcycle brand by mayor supermarkets was shown to just collect and store the soft plastic in large warehouses.
For bottles there is a refund scheme.
I worked in an office with recycling bins where everything was just gathered up and thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. It wasn't just our cleaning people, either: from my desk I could see the only two parking lot entrances and while the garbage truck came weekly, never once did I see a recycling truck.
You might not be seeing what you think you're seeing, WRT everything going into the same truck. Lots of municipalities (e.g. mine) undertake resource extraction from commingled waste & recycling streams. It isn't the same everywhere, but sometimes it's more efficient to just put the entire waste stream through the same extraction process to recover recyclable materials. The separate receptacles at the client side are obviously redundant, but sometimes those remain from legacy processing arrangements.
I heard this as well. There is a recycling plant that you need to run anyway to separate the waste/rubbish so you might as well use it to get the plastics and cans out. I think there is an argument that while the machine can do it well avoiding the machine does have benefits.
This also doesn't work for paper or cardboard as it would get soiled from what I understand.
The real benefit of separate sources is those machines cannot handle things like plastic bags (they get caught in rollers and jam the machine), dirty diapers, and other such weird stuff. Once you get those out of the stream you may as well separate a few other things that are not recyclable so you need less of the expensive separation machines. However you always need sorting machines - people will make mistakes and so you need to verify everything really is recyclable.
likewise at a large office building I'm familiar with
it was said that because employees/building tenants contaminate the recycling bins with unrecyclable items including food waste, there was no point to do anything but combine it into the trash
however the recycling bins were kept presumably to keep people from protesting about trashing everything, and the memory of this news quickly faded
the same goes for recycling bins in downtown toronto - they're so contaminated that they go straight to landfill
PepsiCo did the same thing. Custodians dumped everything into the same bags. Leadership confirmed it all went to the dump. Still had a personal recycle bin crammed under every desk.
More likely it costs the building cleaners time & money. No economic benefit for them so they don't bother even if overall there might be a benefit. Incentives need to align.
Piling our waste on/in the ground has 1000x less harmful side effects than the waste we burn and spray into the air from hundreds of millions different locations.
Yeah, the environmentalists are the problem here. /s
Anyway, the simple obvious solution (after reduce, reuse, recycle) is molten salt oxidation.
> Molten salt oxidation is a non-flame, thermal process that destroys all organic materials while simultaneously retaining inorganic and hazardous components in the melt. It is used as either hazardous waste treatment (with air) or energy harvesting similar to coal and wood gasification (with steam).
> I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.
Are many ... not? Seems like a weird complaint, I haven't encountered an "environmentalist" (whatever that even is) that is against landfills in general or the engineering of it. I'd rather we didn't produce as much garbage as we are and I hate that our city makes me wrap my garbage in more garbage otherwise they won't pick it up. But I still find the engineering impressive.
Garbage Lasagna’: Dumps Are a Big Driver of Warming, Study Says
Don't gaslight me and tell me environmentalists applaud all solutions to environmental issues equally. They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
Studies researching the negative effects of landfills are the necessary first step in making them environmentally friendly. How else would we know what to do?
Perhaps whatever you have in mind has to do with people's desire to keep more garbage out of the landfill in the first place? I don't know.
> They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
I don't know what that's referring to but where I live, the vast majority of recycling does not leave the province. So I can't really empathize with the example, I'm aware of the trope though. Perhaps this is one of the things that's much different in the US and less so in other places.
I think the search results are not representative of what actual humans think.
I guess I consider myself an environmentalist, in that it's a relatively high priority to me to avoid causing unnecessary environmental destruction. I regularly take some effort to dispose of hazardous waste appropriately, etc, but I normally don't go around announcing my environmental priorities. It's not that I don't care, it's just that talking about it is usually not much fun, and is unlikely to help anything.
I think my attitude on the matter is pretty common in my area.
> They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
That's a side effect of (way too) lax regulations and the externalities of disposing of plastics not being paid for!
Germany and a few other EU countries for example force any introducer of "recyclable" packaging to pay into a system to fund recycling stream collection, sorting and disposals ("Grüner Punkt" [1]). Yes, it's not perfect, way too much of our plastics waste still is exported to poor countries, but the ban on that is already law that will come into force in a few years [2].
OP is thinking of people who bumper sticker "Believe Science" but never took science beyond grade school or a required "science for poets" class. People who think "chemicals are bad, but organic is good".
These are not bad people, but they don't know what they're talking about enough to form their own opinions, but they don't know that.
You're perhaps talking about the downstream effects of sunsetting nuclear energy but even since then, the ratio of renewable energy has only increased. So what do you mean exactly?
They barely made it into parliament at all most elections, hovering around 5% in 2002 and 2006 and well below 10% after that until 2021. I think you might be giving them too much credit.
Sorry, it was vegan gas, not organic. They stopped labelling it that way, obviously, after being thoroughly ridiculed. It’s difficult to find references to it now, but some articles from that time (2020-2022 I think) remain, e.g. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/decouple/greenpeace-sel...
There might be some traces of it in the Internet archive.
I get why people laught at it but let’s not forget anaerobic digestion reactors do produce methane from manure and last centuries oleoindustrie was using tons of cetacean fat, so vegan gaz is not litterally meaningless.
Environmentalists in the US are against nuclear power, solar power, geothermal energy. They are against high-rise buildings and pro-golf-courses. They can be safely ignored since their stated goals and their actions can only be concordant if one assumes they're idiots or enemies.
> ...can only be concordant if one assumes they're idiots. It's unlikely they are...
Why would you say that it's unlikely? That's a very strange assumption to make - Hanlon has a whole razor about that. They're absolutely idiots. Or, put more politely and precisely, they're operating from intuition - "nature good, technology and/or human development bad" - without thinking about whether the ultimate consequences of what they're pushing for will properly advance their cause.
Can you please point me to a single environmentalist who is against nuclear power, solar power, geothermal energy, and high-rise buildings but is for golf courses?
I'm sure you can find plenty of people who check one or more of those boxes, but I'm interested to know if there's anyone who checks enough of them to be self-contradictory.
If you can't point me to one person who holds all beliefs, then you're falling for the classic fallacy of treating a group of individuals as if they were a hive mind. See comments about how "HN" both believes in unrestricted capitalism and supports privacy regulations.
What, 3 out of 4 isn't good enough for you? The high rise part of the comment is an example of "one of these things is not like the others" in that of course people all about the money will like high rises.
It also doesn't matter what you think Donald Trump does or does not believe. He has a 4 year track record, and is on record making comments about what he will do if elected again.
The Trump administration backed away from policies meant to reduce carbon emissions, and promoted policies meant to increase energy independence through increased reliance on and use of fossil fuels. The same administration also rolled back nearly 100 separate environmental regulations. It supported developing energy reserves on federally protected land, including national forests and near national monuments.
Trump himself has regularly expressed skepticism over anthropogenic global warming.
I’m… genuinely not sure you can reconcile this with a claim of him being an environmentalist on any axis.
I modified my original comment to replace "people" with "environmentalist" in the first sentence to clarify what I meant—you probably read it before I did that. Sorry.
Just so we’re clear, you’re asserting that Donald Trump is an environmentalist?
So we’re on the same page, Wiktionary defines that as: one who advocates for the protection of the environment and biosphere from misuse from human activity.
Fiscal conservatives in the US are against raising taxes, decreasing military spending, or cutting social security. They can be safely ignored since their stated actions can only be concordant if one assumes they are idiots.
It turns out, if you take a wide and varied group, put all of the ideas that any of them have in a bag and shake it up, then assign all those ideas to all of them, you can claim them idiots. Or bad faith actors.
When really it’s the cheap rhetorical trick that is the real sign of idiocy.
Actually most that I know are all in that bucket. The trick is that this raises the deficits which they then get to blame on the next Democrat in office. It’s a fun party trick.
Say what you will about “tax and spend” liberals but it’s a sight better than political faction that spends even more but forgets entirely about the revenue end of the equation.
The counter for that is that taxes change economic activity and so raising taxes doesn't bring in as much revenue as you would think because some activities are no longer worth doing (profitable) after paying higher taxes. (not to mention people looking for tax deductions).
Of course taxes are not a revenue optimization problem to those pointing the above out. It is the tax and spenders that should be looking at the above and are not (other than childish claims that trickle down doesn't work)
The gas is generated by the chemistry of the stuff that was put there. Moving the stuff there takes a lot of energy, but everything sitting there mainly just needs a pump and treatment system.
This is besides the point because environmentalists (who were carped at above) tend to seek to reduce the amount of trash that needs to be shipped off to somewhere.
reducing trash is useful. Recycling of trash is sometimes worse than throwing it in a landfill. There are many different plastics and many different grades of used paper so there is no one size fits all. People often want to think I recycle so I'm good - but effort is needed to reduce packaging and things that break early.
I think their point was the delivery of that garbage over time is subject to entropy, and from first principles probably took more energy consumption than a sustained 84MW over the time period the landfill is a viable source for energy.
I know nothing about landfill engineering here, to be frank, simply being a grease for good online gearing.
A single truck requires more energy to operate in a year than 70k homes do!? I find this extremely difficult to believe.
As far as I can tell, the EIA [1] suggests the average home uses 10,791 kWh a year. A gallon of gasoline contains ~33.7 kWh of energy per the EPA/Wikipedia [2].
This would mean that a single truck would be burning 70,000 * 10,791 / 33.7 = 22,414,540 gallons of gasoline a year or 61,409 gallons a day. Seems like wild bullshit to me.
you should note that a gas engine does not convert all that 33kWh of energy into mechanical energy. a gasoline engine has about a 25% conversion into mechanical energy. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml . diesel might be a bit better than a car but it's city driving by nature.
just heat alone is the largest waste product in a car or truck
A tank of gas is still a tank of gas, regardless of what it gets used for.
Energy in = energy out + waste + energy stored
The truck is barely storing anything on average, so what you've described is energy out and waste, but the calculations to compare the truck to the landfill was done on Energy in - the amount of gas that it needs to be filled with.
For the same total job, you could raise or lower how quickly the truck goes through a tank of gas, but that variance has already been averaged out
According to [1] an electric garbage truck traveling 15,000 miles a year uses about 38,960 kWh. An 84 MW power plant produces 84,000 kWh every hour, or enough to power more than two trucks for an entire year. Even if we assume that the diesel equivalent uses a hundred times as much it's still a tiny fraction of what the plant in TFA produces.
Couple issues with that comparison: 15k seemed low given I drive ~10k a year and I don't work a job that uses my car, so I checked refuse trucks drive on average more like 25k miles per year and there are many servicing a single dump. Also most garbage trucks are still diesel so you've got to 5-10x that power usage number and there's all the vehicles used to compact and move the trash once it reaches the landfill which are also (currently) pretty exclusively diesel powered (think bulldozers and soil compactors with some excavators thrown in).
A 500 hp semi truck engine running at peak power is like 350 kw, so 84 megawatts (84,000 kw) is more than 200 of those engines at full throttle at all times.
This is my argument against recycling. It is not sustainable to recover a tiny amount of energy when balanced with the extra diesel-guzzling truck traversing the neighborhood. All so we can think we're "making a difference" by keeping plastic bottles out of a landfill.
> It is not sustainable to recover a tiny amount of energy when balanced with the extra diesel-guzzling truck traversing the neighborhood.
It’s a good thing we have electric motors, then. An additional benefit is that they are much less likely to wake you up when they get your bins at 5am.
Exactly. Recycling shouldn't be implemented if it uses dirty energy. There should be accounting and accountability. Don't pretend an operation is green unless it really is.
I think people generally want to do what they feel is right. The problem lies in 1) the use of propaganda to force blanket solutions to what they pose as the problem and 2) not using evidence-based scientific methods.
for 1) various groups show heart-breaking images of wildlife suffering due to pollution, then work to mobilize the outrage into their solution. for 2), recycling programs should have had metrics, such as lbs of plastic "saved" from the landfill, energy saved from collecting cans, but also the counterpoints such as "tons of CO2 emitted by recycling trucks", and "dollars removed from poor people when local cash-for-cans businesses are shuttered". If the data show they emit more CO2 equivalent than they save, then they should concede that the program has failed. If the program needs a jump-start before it is "ecologically profitable", they should say so and agree to cancel the program if their goals aren't met by X date.
I always find it weird when someone's economic model of the world is basically "I hope corporations aren't greedy and don't raise prices too much" Surely there must be something else going on, no?
I dont understand why something that's recycled, renewable and sustainable can cost more than something that's not.
The price is a proxy for materials and energy required to produce the product. You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive. The sustainability part is one of the most powerful signals captured by price.
So when someone is trying to sell me something that costs more but is somehow more sustainable, I immediately call bs.
> You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive
We're not running out of oil, that's why the market forces you refer to aren't raising the price. This is why almost all mainstream economists call for a carbon price.
This. The problem with fossil fuels right now is not that they are bounded, but that extracting them is polluting the atmosphere and driving climate change. While we've certainly exhausted some of the more easily accessible oil, coal, and natural gas deposits, we've gotten really good at finding more. Production is only scaling down because investment is, not because we've run out of oil to drill for.
Because, if my memory serves, that's the definition of peak oil.
Peak oil is the peak of the curve `energy extracted/energy expended to extract it`. Since 2017, this has been decreasing.
*edit* I realize that the definition of peak oil I've been using (which I believe I've found in the writings of Jancovici) is apparently not the standard definition. My bad.
I feel one thing that few bother to understand is that it would be extremely hard to arrive at "no more oil", even if humanity somehow made a good faith effort to get there. There is oil all over the place on earth. It's not necessarily oil that's economical to extract, even by today's XXX (pick your term) corporations. There is also energy all over the place (again that might not be economical or politically correct to extract right now.) The result of this is that if NNN years in the future you need oil for some worthy reason (say, you need more Legos :-), you can collect and spend the energy and get the oil. That's not an issue.
Because as oil reserves are depleted, oil is extracted from more and more difficult places. Deeper wells, less porous rock, etc. these new sources require more energy to extract the same amount of oil.
More ENERGY needed. Which doesn't have to be oil. Oil is extracted by businesses which pay attention to their bottom line - and so would not, could not, will not use significant amounts of oil to extract comparable oil. Even as you consider current truck mounted prospecting, gas or generator powered drilling, crew vehicles, refineries, all the way to supertankers - these exist BECAUSE the ratio of usage to production is extremely favorable - and not through some fatality. Causality goes the other way: a worsening ratio necessarily causes a switch to other methods.
That's just not true. If it were, oil production would decrease every year from the current year onward. It's actually been increasing, and given recent discoveries of large unconventional reserves in the US and elsewhere, we can keep on increasing oil production every year for a long time.
> extracting oil will consume more oil than it produces.
Huh?
1) EROEI is still strongly positive in fossil fuel extraction, and
2) even if it weren't, we'd still extract fossil fuels.
Given the utility of petroleum as a chemical feedstock and energy-dense fuel for aviation, we're going to keep extracting the stuff long after it becomes EROEI-negative. It makes perfect sense to spend 1.2 units of nuclear/solar/etc. energy to extract 1.0 units of oil energy if that oil energy meets a need that nuclear/solar/etc. can't satisfy.
Isn't it already more expensive to extract oil than it was, say, 30 years ago?
Obviously this is not a perfect proxy, but I remember in the late 90s, gas at this specific gas station near my high school was 92¢/gal. Inflation should bring that up to under $2/gal today, but the average gas price in the US is considerably higher.
(I guess back then the US wasn't exporting oil as we are now, which could account for the difference.)
Very simply: Not all costs are included in the production costs of a good or service, they are external. For example, the producer usually does not pay the full cost of emitting CO2 when producing something. The remaining cost of born by the public, in the form of environmental damage, health issues, and so on. There are many other externalities, like social (e.g. by exploiting workers, you can produce something cheaper).
That's the fallacy of many of these bio-things, more emissions. Keeping consumption habits and dampening our guilt with green washing is not the solution. The keyword is: less.
The recycling processes for these products is newer and therefore less efficient (more costly) as it hasn't had the same time the older processes have had to mature + optimize
To add to this point. A couple of plastic recyclers in my country just went out of business because oil has been made so cheap recently that they are simply priced out of the plastics market. According to interviews with the founders, in the oil and plastics game there is a sense of having to freeze out these new entrants to the market for a little while.
> You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive. The sustainability part is one of the most powerful signals captured by price.
That's true, but only if we're running into short term shortages or it's actually becoming scarce due to depletion. It's possible for a resource to be finite but bountiful over large time scales.
Renewable/sustainable resources usually have a large infrastructure cost, have yet to benefit from decades of process refinement, and until they've capture a significant market share can't reap the benefits of mass production.
So it's expected that new sustainable methods will cost more until they catch up. There's vertical and horizontal integration efficiencies to work out, there's supply chains to optimize, production methods to scale and optimize, market share to capture, etc. If anything, I'm skeptical of things claiming to be better cheaper overnight successes - it's too good to be true.
> You can say that eventually we'll run out of [resource] but as we do the price goes up making alternatives more attractive.
Except for oil. Oil is basically what backs the global economy. What it means is that when oil’s prices are raising a little, the global economy just automatically slows down enough to reduce the demand and keep the prices where they are.
That’s why oil prices are an illusion.
But more importantly, the issue with oil is not (only) the price, it’s that there is still enough oil reserves for the humanity to fuck the climate for thousands of years.
In both case we are going to lack oil. But we will suffer pretty differently given it’s voluntary or not.
Why constrain production to "painstakingly gluing back together" a broken bowl? And if reuse and recycling are desirable, why make bowls out of materials that are easily breakable and difficult to repair or recycle in the first place?
I think in general it's true but not for every case.
If I can produce something that provides the same benefit at a lower expense I can undercut you.
This fact actually drives de materialization that has led to things like simpler packaging and a reduction in emissions in the US and other industrialized countries over the last 30 years (both absolute and per capita)
> The price is a proxy for materials and energy required to produce the product.
You're right. Prices reveal true preference and constraints. The market is a machine for answering the question "What should we be working on?". Sometimes, people don't like the answers the market produces and invent justifications for distorting or ignoring price signals. In the limit, this practice amounts to a command economy. Disregarding price signals makes us all worse off and we shouldn't do it.
If something is expensive, that means it's scarce, and if it isn't, that means it isn't. If there's some negative externality you think the market isn't capturing, well, capture that externality. Put a number on it; don't make it a moral issue. It's only through numbers that we understand the world.
> If there's some negative externality you think the market isn't capturing, well, capture that externality. Put a number on it; don't make it a moral issue.
The problem is that the people not paying for these externalities don't want to, have no incentive to, and are not required to. They lobby to avoid laws and regulations that would make them do it.
So meanwhile we have people dying due to air and water pollution created by people who don't want to pay for their externalities. FooCorp doesn't care if the country's health care costs go up because of that; they still make more money than they would if they had to pay for their externalities.
The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.
> The problem is that the people not paying for these externalities don't want to, have no incentive to, and are not required to. They lobby to avoid laws and regulations that would make them do it.
Perhaps the externalities are exaggerated then? If you say something is scarce and the market says it's abundant, who's right? You? Why?
The fact is that Lego isn't, to any meaningful degree, contributing to adverse outcomes by using petroleum as a feedstock. The market tells them they got the right answer. Their oil use is a drop in the bucket. They shouldn't feel pressured to worsen their product over moral and aesthetic pressure from activists.
> The economic argument doesn't work, so it's a little hard not to frame it as a moral issue instead.
The market is working just fine. The trouble is that the moralizers don't like the priority stack rank the market produces and seek to use various forms of non-market power to get the outcomes they want. People doing this makes us all worse off. Trust the market.
Being able to reuse or recycle a material doesn't make it less energy intensive to acquire in the form you need it to be for your purposes. I don't know why you think otherwise.
I don't know, if I reuse or recycle something it's cheaper or free.
For instance, a restaurant may reuse utensils by washing them. Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.
That's the whole point of reusing and recycling. Reducing my cost. Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.
> That's the whole point of reusing and recycling. Reducing my cost.
When reuse or recycling is saving consumers money and/or making companies money, everyone already does it. Things like salvaging copper wiring from old buildings or putting wrecked cars into junk yards to be stripped of useful parts and scrapped.
> Even if something is more energy intensive to create, it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.
This assumes the cost of getting raw materials is greater than that of salvaging old materials. This is true for metals which is why you see people collecting used cans or recycling phones for "free". But it's not true for plastics (petroleum is ridiculously cheap and easy to get) which is why you don't see corporations fighting to collect the Pacific garbage patch or offering free recycling services for consumers to get at their waste plastic.
Lol tf? Plastics typically are not reusable, so now you're left with recycling. Many plastics like PET can be pretty easily recycled and come in few colors. It's unfortunate that there are also there are piles of different plasitc formulations that cannot be mixed and easily recycled. It's easy and cheap to mix pure feeds took, it's not easy to get the plasticizers and coloration out.
Your example of reusing utensils assumes cleaning is free.
Let's say that COVID v2 requires restaurants to sterilize utensils so thoroughly that it costs $1000 per utensil. Obviously at that point most restaurants would opt to just buy new utensils each time.
Reuse, sure, but I doubt you have the equipment required to recycle paper, glass, metals, plastic, etc. If you did, I'm sure you'd know that equipment was probably pretty expensive to purchase, and far from free to operate.
> Or recycle crates by using them as decorations.
That's not really "recycling", that's just another form of reuse.
> it's being used multiple times reducing the cost.
That's if it's being reused. Most people don't reuse all that much of what they consume. Think soda cans or bottles, jars of peanut butter or jams, plastic laundry detergent containers, paper or plastic grocery bags, etc. Most of that ends up being thrown away after being used once.
It's great when people reuse those things over and over after their initial use, but the reality is that very few people actually do so.
All of this is why very little of the plastic we toss in recycling bins actually gets recycled. It's just not economically feasible to recycle all that plastic. For decades now we've shipped all of it overseas, but a lot of those places have stopped taking our plastic, because they don't want it either.
Imagine there's a material A that there's only 100,000 of left.
It takes only 1 energy to consume it and turn it into a single product. Also using it could cause -5 damage to the environment.
You realize however that it is not sustainable, it's going to be done at some point in the future.
You start to look for solutions. You find a new material that can replace the other material B, however it's not as good for making the products. It takes 5 energy to consume it and it takes 3 energy to make the product and then when recycled it takes another 3 energy.
> a restaurant may reuse utensils by washing them.
Can't just the employee cost of gathering and placing them in a dishwasher, the fraction of the cost of the dishwasher machine itself, sorting them out, replacing the quantity that got stolen or thrown in the garbage by mistake or damaged, the accounting of mistakes where dirty or otherwise unsanitary ones are handed to customers, etc... exceed the cost of disposable?
It's not a theoretical concern. Or at least any theoretical concern is not hugely useful in the practical operation of a restaurant.
But if you're not reusing things as they are, at the site where you already have it, then you need a whole system to collect, clean, and sort it.
Additionally, the price of new materials does not include what it costs to get rid of them, nor does it typically include the cost of fixing what gets destroyed (like nature or human fertility) when its made or discarded.
I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
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