
The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End - SteveNuts
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/
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NorthOf33rd
From a linked nat geo article:

“I never thought plastic recycling would work,” says Roland Geyer, an
engineering professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and
author of the study “Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made.”
“There is a viable business model around metal, but plastics never has had
that. It’s too low-value, too contaminated, with too many different polymers
mixed together. And you can only make it work with a really low cost of
labor.”

Fascinating stuff. Perhaps it's time to step away from plastic containers for
foodstuffs. I'm a little surprised we didn't move at least a little further
away post BPA awareness.

In Salt Lake City they stopped accepting many types of plastic in the
recycling bin this summer, it's been a huge PITA. It's also led me to recycle
less. This bugged me so I've changed my shopping habits a bit to compensate.
For example, I avoid shopping at Trader Joe's, because everything there comes
wrapped in plastic. Everything. It doesn't seem like retailers have quite
caught on that it's becoming more difficult to recycle.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor.

Yet, isn’t that what automation provides? It has been two decades since
supermarkets in the Nordic countries have whizbang bottle-return machines that
take back plastic, aluminium, and glass bottles as long as the barcode is
still legible. Is there really no way to make a machine that scans the barcode
of various other forms of plastic packaging (like yoghurt containers, ketchup
bottles, etc.) and then directs the item to the appropriate container? Since
the machine will know the exact categorization of the packaging on the basis
of the barcode, then consumers would not be required to correctly sort plastic
rubbish themselves.

~~~
NorthOf33rd
Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the
industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate
I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free.

Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass
collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one
could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general trash bin
it goes. We certainly don't get paid for our our glass.

It's extra disappointing because local...legal strangeness, has been
encouraging a bit of a local brewery boom. I'd love to return the glass to the
brewery for cleaning and reuse, but that's not an option here.

All that said, there's a ton of plastic that goes into single stream recycling
that isn't barcoded...

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cc439
>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse

This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense.
Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production
process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put
the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of
course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of but from what I recall,
glass recycling isn't just uneconomical to recycle, it often winds up
requiring more energy to recycle than it does to obtain the base materials and
create a new container. Contamination knocks down the efficiency and the
logistics of collecting and sorting glass are far less efficient than the bulk
mining and transport of silica into a centralized production plant.

A possible solution to this, IMO, is to force bottling operations to
standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes, colors/opaqueness,
and closure type. This could also work hand in hand with a ban on plastic
bottles for common products like juice, soda, etc. Marketing departments would
hate it but the centralized redistribution of reusable containers that are
useful to every bottling operation would finally make glass recycling a
rational concept.

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Evidlo
This is what a local milk company does in Illinois (Oberweis). You get $1.50
for returning the jug to the store.

[https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/37924/2013/01/T800x600/3722a...](https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/37924/2013/01/T800x600/3722af7cf19bee74765e0f81fcb005dc.jpg?width=705)

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nradov
We need to focus more on reuse than on recycling. I'd like to see regulations
and tax incentives to encourage beverage companies to use glass bottles that
can be washed and reused, rather than disposable aluminum or (even worse)
plastic.

It's a common sight in Silicon Valley offices to see greasy empty pizza boxes
in the recycling bin. People just don't seem to realize that greasy cardboard
can't be recycled, and might even contaminate other material.

~~~
jayd16
But as the article suggest, most glass is contaminated and thrown away.

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nradov
It's tough to recycle glass. That's why I suggested we focus on _reusing_
glass bottles. Use deposits to encourage consumers to return bottles to
retailers, then send them back to bottling plants to be washed and refilled.
That actually used to be common in the US but doesn't happen much anymore.

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matheweis
There is a slow turnaround happening in this area with milk, at least in the
cities I’ve lived in the last several years. You can buy milk in glass jars,
(as a bonus, produced within the state) and take the the empty bottles back to
the grocery store for a $2 credit.

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coliveira
Single stream recycling was a big scam that worked as long as China was
accepting this kind of garbage. The more people used this type of recycling,
the more they could send to China and the less garbage had to be processed
locally. Now that they have to deal locally with the realities of recycling,
you see that the equation is changing.

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aznpwnzor
This is primarily a cultural issue.

Taiwanese children are taught from day one how to sort recyclables. It is
standard not only to sort properly, but also wash containers and decompose
them into parts if they are made up of different materials.

Not only that but due to Japanese influence, reuse is a huge part of the
culture already.

There's even a completely different conversation about how children are taught
how to fold their trash and stack containers to minimize space use in trash.

Weird how if we take advantage of the neural nets we are born with what we can
do...

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forkLding
Wonder what would happen if plastic bags and straws were just no longer used,
I already pack my groceries in a school bag when I go shopping because the
plastic bags are flimsy.

Straws aren't also necessary, I don't drink coffee I buy with a straw and I'm
managing fine. Soft drinks can probably just have those coffee caps and then
gradually transition.

~~~
omnimus
I think this is coming. Straws are getting banned in EU next year and many
countries already implemented the ban. Where i am from they got replaced with
paper ones and in bars etc with metal / glass ones that get washed like
regular glasses. Plastic bags cannot be given for free so you have to buy them
and many chains are transitioning to paper or more durable ikea style bags.

The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those.

~~~
jogjayr
> The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those.

Composting, and recycling glass, metal, and paper greatly reduces the need for
plastic trash bags. Most of my regular trash these days is plastic that can't
be recycled - either food contaminated, or thin plastic bags. And when you
have so little landfill trash, you don't need to buy those massive plastic
garbage bags. In my household, we just use the plastic bags that we get our
produce in - and we don't even bag all of our produce, just things like leafy
greens (delicate) or green beans/okra (hard to keep together)

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raverbashing
Plastic is hard, but it does not necessarily need to go back to what it was.

Burning it or turning it into asphalt or other kind of building material might
be easier/cheaper

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maxxxxx
Recycling and trash separation would be a great a project for a "moonshot".
You need big advancements in robotics, computer vision and probably a lot of
other areas to make this. I wish some billionaire would throw some money at
it. It would be more helpful to humanity than flying to Mars for example.

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diggernet
I can't wait for the glorious era of fusion-powered recycling. Dump literally
anything in the bin. It all gets vaporized (thanks to plentiful, cheap
energy), and is centrifuge-sorted into its constituent atoms.

Out of curiosity... Just how delusional am I?

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ggm
High heat is one of the ways PCBs are reprocessed to constituents. Given the
energy cost to make long chain molecules it seems a shame to spend energy
breaking them. I think it might be better to not make as much in the first
place and make kinds which are thermo-mouldable to repurpose

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wavesounds
Out of curiosity does anyone know of any startups in the trash/recycling
space?

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8bitsrule
There are compostable plastics (e.g.
[http://www.worldcentric.org/biocompostables/bioplastics](http://www.worldcentric.org/biocompostables/bioplastics))

(No info there on pricing ...)

"Bioplastics can take different length of times to totally compost ... and are
meant to be composted in a commercial composting facility, where higher
composting temperatures can be reached and is between 90-180 days. Most
existing international standards require biodegradation of 60% within 180
days..."

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athenot
By weight, I estimate that my household produces about 1/3 recyclable trash
vs. landfill trash. But by volume, it's almost at parity (before compaction,
since I'm a household).

I wonder if an equal alternative would be to collect each type of recyclable
once a month. Eg.

\- 1st week: paper/cardboards

\- 2nd week: plastics

\- 3rd week: glass

\- 4th week: metals

Yes it would mean more trash cans but in total volume I don't think it would
be much different than my current single-stream bi-weekly collection.

~~~
GordonS
Different parts of the UK have different collection policies, but for us, our
food waste is collected every week, while recycling (paper/card, plastic,
metal, but not glass in our area :/) and rubbish ("garbage" for merkins) are
collected on alternating weeks.

There was uproar when we moved to this from weekly rubbish and recycling
collection, but most of the time it really seems to work - we recycle far more
than I thought we would.

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nitwit005
I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but here if you peek inside the separate
bins outside, or in restaurants, it's basically just mixed trash.

Aside from the usual problem of people not caring about sorting, one or more
of the bins is often full, and homeless people sort through the trash to take
the aluminum cans, leaving mostly the incorrectly sorted stuff behind.

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ggm
Some domestic recycling was partially sorted to separate cardboard and paper
from glass and metal. I think cost shifting and effort/cost decisions here are
heading back to the user/consumer input end having more work to do. Incentives
here would have to be things like a discount on the waste levy.

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baybal2
It is surreal, but it's true, the biggest American export to China was
literally garbage...

And it kept being such after decades of different rounds of bans, until the
blanket ban last year.

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skybrian
Maybe this is a silly question, but what are the downsides of going back to
sending more trash to landfills?

