
Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' - srameshc
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/09/568797388/recycling-chaos-in-u-s-as-china-bans-foreign-waste
======
oppositelock
Good for China, they've got an environmental nightmare to deal with, and part
of it comes from the US offloading lots of "recycling" operations there, and I
use that term loosely, particularly for electronics. We also "export"
pollution to China by buying cheaper products that would be more expensive if
they didn't externalize their pollution costs, and it's sure better to
externalize that pollution abroad than domestically. The US, in my opinion,
has been burying its head in the sand about the pollution which occurs when
manufacturing everything that we use.

Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally
beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the
operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling
bin doesn't end up in the dump.

Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that
automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but
lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals.
Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than
making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into
existing paper process.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Nobody forced china to take America’s trash. They simply undercut other
recyclers, making them economically unviable. The same thing happened with
rare earths, china didn’t mind to pollute their land to process them, again
making cleaner but more expensive means of production economically unviable.
This is really the crux of china’s environmental problems: if your competitors
cheat by cutting corners in environmental protection while you don’t, you
simply don’t exist after awhile. Unhindered capitalism.

Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the
USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.

~~~
oppositelock
It sounds like China is starting to crack down. It's a luxury you have once
you're affluent enough. The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty
everywhere that it's happened.

~~~
whatyoucantsay
> The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on
such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have
greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly
affected.

Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.

~~~
gozur88
You're underestimating the amount of pollution other countries produced during
industrialization. There used to be rivers in the US that were flammable
because manufacturers discharges so many volatile effluents into them.

London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds
the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.

Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.

~~~
Houshalter
England was so polluted that the wildlife evolved dark camouflage to blend in
with soot covered trees:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution)

------
njarboe
Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly. The bottom can be clay
sealed with leak monitoring to protect the ground water. With a little extra
effort they can designed for methane capture to prevent problematic off
gassing. Maybe aluminum and other purish metal scrap gets taken out of the
waste stream and the rest goes back to the Earth. Some carbon capture happens
and the site can be mined in the future if it seems worthwhile. Add video
monitoring of what goes in for future prospectors to evaluate the ore body and
call it a day.

Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of
like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net
negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem,
potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak
in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost
disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus
one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the
current three.

~~~
Aloha
Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense.
But Recycling itself is a good idea - we used to do this, AT&T did it with
everything they made, milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products
like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead
of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more, but right now, those
costs are still present, they're just being passed down to an unknown party,
at an unknown point in the future.

We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can
do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.

~~~
Cyphase
> ... Recycling itself is a good idea ... milk and soda came in reusable
> bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others
> also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the
> manufacturer more ...

As you say at the end of my quote, that's reuse, not recycling. Plus you're
really only talking about using glass bottles instead of plastic bottles. None
of that means that "Recycling itself is a good idea".

~~~
Aloha
Arguably, Glass, and Metal are easier to recycle - but more energy intensive
to do so - its much easier to sort glass and metal than the 9000 kinda of
plastic.

I'd argue that reuse and recycling are in many cases, functionally semantics.

~~~
ars
There's no reason to recycle glass. The planet is made of it. Almost every
rock you see around you can be melted into glass.

And it's completely harmless if thrown out. At most crush it first.

The only thing worth recycling is metal.

~~~
throwaway5752
This is dated but really interesting:
[https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf)

It's worthwhile to recycle glass.

~~~
yorwba
First paragraph of the conclusion section:

 _Recycling of glass containers saves some energy, but not a signifcant
quantity compared to reuse. The primary energy saved is about 2.2 x 10^6 Btu
/ton, or 13% of the energy required to make glass containers from virgin raw
materials. This estimate includes energy required for the entire product life
cycle, starting with raw materials in the ground and ending with either final
waste disposition in a landfill or recycled materal collection, processing,
and return to the primary manufacturing process. The actual savings depend on
local factors, including population density; locations of landfills, recovery
facilities, and glass plants; and process efficiencies at the specifc
facilities available. The savings increase if wastes must be transported long
distances to a landfill or if the containers are made in an inefficient
furnace. They decrease if there is no local MRF or glass plant, or if material
losses in the recycling loop are high. If the MRF is as much as 100 mi away,
savings from recycling are negated._

~~~
throwaway5752
Sure! It's the 2nd best choice. Reuse as much as possible. What can't be
reused, recycle. But it's significantly better to recycle it than throw it in
the garbage for almost everyone.

------
Animats
This is going to work out great. All the technology for automatically sorting
and recycling plastic exists. There are production plants using it. The best
sorters aren't widely used yet, but they're available. Even
ABS/polyethylene/polystyrene sorting is available. The US has been shipping
unsorted wasted to China, but now will have to sort and recycle it
domestically.

The biggest plastic recycling plant in the US is in Riverside, California.[1]
In go mixed bottles, out come injection molding pellets. The technology is
working at scale right now.

Bloomberg sees this ban as a boost for the US plastics industry.[2]

[1] [https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-
inside...](https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside-the-
worlds-largest-plastic-bottle-recycling-plant-0)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-
s-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-s-blow-to-
recycling-boosts-u-s-s-185-billion-plastic-bet)

~~~
nikanj
Check this out, from Finland
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1sOPqM_VA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1sOPqM_VA)

~~~
Animats
Nice. Most of the sorting is done by mechanical methods - shakers, screens,
flotation tanks, magnets - but most plants still have a few manual pickers
pulling out strange stuff. That's a robot job.

Then glass and plastics are chopped into pellets, and sorted by color and
material. That uses the same vision technology used to sort farm products.
Vision-based sorting is so fast that it's routine to sort _individual peas_
using machine vision. Sorting glass cullet into clear, amber, and green works
just as well. Sorting plastic by type is rarer, but here's a line for that.[1]

Here's a overview of a production recycling plant.[2] A random mix of stuff
goes in, and stage by stage, each material flow becomes more uniform, until
material ready for reuse comes out.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0)

------
Manglano
The almost-invisible consumer habits of the past 100 years circumscribe
virtually all of the greatest environmental disasters of the next 100, bearing
in mind that "environmental disaster" has only existed since the steam engine
or the logging of the Old Growth forests, depending upon where your measure of
advanced development begins.

When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of
the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of
it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but
that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends
industrial engineering.

~~~
djsumdog
When people go on about climate change, it bothers me because the fact of if
climate change is man accelerated or not is totally irrelevant. CO2 is the
least of our pollution problems, when you look at planned obsolescence,
cellphones more powerful than 2000s laptops that are designed to only have a
2~4 year lifecycle, the prevalence of electric cards which all take barrels of
oil to produce, the total and complete lack of real rail systems in the US,
which use a fraction of the power consumption of cars (a system America use to
have and is now gone), etc etc etc

Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and
demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as
other forms of pollution. The real inconvenient truth is that overall
consumption needs to go down. It means smaller factories, less industry
growth, higher paying factory jobs and a total change in our fundamental value
systems ... so really it's never going to change until after the next global
collapse .. not that 2008 bullshit, I mean a real one.

~~~
graeme
>Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and
demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as
other forms of pollution.

Not so. Carbon stays and accumulates. It's not the annual emissions which
matter, it's the total emissions to date which matters.

At this point, we've _already_ put too much in the atmosphere. Continuing to
emit, at a lower rate, would still be adding to the problem. It would be an
improvement over emitting _even larger_ amounts, but we'd still be making the
overall situation worse off with each passing year.

~~~
jack9
> Carbon stays and accumulates

Stop hand waving. Trees use it, algae use it, at the very least. Carbon
doesn't stick around with the persistence of mercury. Rate of emission is
precisely what matters. The problem is that it outpaces the consumption.
There's an opportunity to create an industry of carbon consumption that will
only arise after the crisis point (depending on which countries blink first).

~~~
adrianN
A good chunk of the atmospheric CO2 is only removed by geological processes
that take tens of thousands of years. Trees and algea only bind carbon
temporarily, it's released when they rot. Only a part of the carbon stays in
the soil. The carbon cycle is pretty complex:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle)

------
macawfish
I am dismayed at how little people care about this. If more people (not even
everyone) had some basic knowledge of plastics and the will to rinse the
containers they recycle, sorting would be much more efficient. But I'd be
willing to bet that most people use their recycling bin as a kind of funny
second trash can. I know my roommates do. We got fined and they _still_ put
dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling
bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials).
Effectively though, the recycling is being used like a special garbage can.

~~~
kemiller
Solutions which require universal virtue are usually doomed.

~~~
has2k1
I think so too. Maybe a way around is if you think of it as being largely
carrots and sticks. When the stick is big enough the results can be comparable
to those of universal virtue.

~~~
kemiller
That is true. But that way lies totalitarianism.

------
thaeli
The Chinese government has already relaxed the proposed rules somewhat, in
response to criticism that the increased standards were actually impossible to
meet with current processes and equipment. And this article fails to mention
that many of the Chinese companies in this sector were grossly negligent in
their handling of the "contamination" \- of course no one wants to say "our
buyer in China had their license revoked because they were literally pouring
toxic waste in a river" but that's the sort of thing that was going on.

There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in
automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting
that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing
technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and
existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the
long term, this is definitely the path forward.

The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that
are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling
exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the
short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.

~~~
intrasight
I agree that more automation is going to happen. But I also think that
regulations which increase recycleability will be required.

------
CalChris
A similar ripple is happening as China scales back on coal.

Coal gets mined in Utah and shipped on unit trains out to Stockton, CA and put
on freighters to China. A local developer is trying to move that port to
Oakland but upwind of a residential area. He'd been turned down a few times
but he tricked an administrator into a bad contract which the city has
rejected. A lawsuit was filed.

[http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-
judgmen...](http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-judgment/)

[http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-
coal...](http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal-
consumption-drives-global-slowdown-emissions)

I don't think Tagami will have demand but the lawsuit goes on.

------
ProfessorLayton
I highly recommend the documentary Plastic China. It is heartbreaking to watch
the stories and struggles of the families that are filmed.

It’s available to stream on Prime video. It is a real eye opener for what
happens next to some of the waste we throw into the recycle bin, long after we
have forgotten about it.

~~~
antris
Got Prime, but "This title is not available in your current location"

Heh. Thanks.

------
redshirt
Seems like Germany had this one figured out. One non-recyclable thing found in
your building’s garbage and you’re all in trouble. The US is way too lax on
enforcing good practices. We waste too much, and when we do feel good
recycling drives we do it lazily.

~~~
foxhop
Agreed but like maybe companies shouldn't produce waste packaging, etc.

This sounds an awful lot like "blame the litter bugs".

Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk)

~~~
redshirt
How about not buying stuff with poor packaging. Sure, sometimes we don’t have
a choice, but many times we do. Often it’s as simple as preparing food at home
versus getting take out. I’d prefer laws to mandate recycleable packaging.
Problem solved. Petrochemical industry will be ticked.

~~~
richardknop
People working 12 hours per day don't really have time to cook. Also if stuff
wrapped in plastic is cheaper, people will buy it as money is a limited
resource they need for so many other things.

Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this -
mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little
consumers is a fool's endeavor.

~~~
adrianN
Luckily most people don't work 12 hours per day.

~~~
richardknop
Lots of poor and blue collar working class people do 12 hour work days (for
example truckers or workers in construction). And these are the people that
are usually described here as "primitive" consumers who only eat fast food and
buy cheap prepared food in plastic containers.

------
zumu
I don't understand why there's so little education in America about what is
recyclable and what isn't. When I lived in Japan, every district in most
cities had detailed documentation about what goes where on what day, how to
clean it, etc. When you go to restaurants, there's images of the items that
are recyclable on their respective recycle bins and images of what goes in the
trash on the trash bins. There's also drains to pour out pet bottles, etc.

Is it that hard to spread some basic documentation about recycling?

~~~
diogenescynic
Easy—there’s more money to be made from Americans being wasteful.

~~~
zumu
Aren't we losing money by no longer being able to sell our recyclables to
China? Isn't the crux of this article the exact opposite of what you're
saying?

------
Spooky23
In my mind this illustrates the obvious flaws in the globalized economy where
we build these wacky supply chains based on exploiting poorer countries.

Other examples abound. Shipping chickens harvested in Arkansas to be butchered
in China and sold in Massachusetts is another.

~~~
maxerickson
Snopes doesn't think that chickens are going on such an incredible journey.

[https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken-
reshipped/](https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken-reshipped/)

------
superquest
It's amazing that a "waste shipping industry" between parties on opposite
sides of the planet can exist at all.

I guess it's possible because "developed nations" send back empty container
ships which might as well be turned into dump trucks?

~~~
mistermann
The sheer size and capability of China (hundreds of millions of people willing
to work extremely hard in exchange for little money) has allowed a wide
variety of things to happen in the world that otherwise simply wouldn't be
possible.

Their deciding that they no longer are willing to participate in things like
this can be a massive (in a time frame and to a degree that a lot of people
will be utterly confused and scratching their heads "but how can this be, it
doesn't make any sense!!!???") game changer.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm not sure its the 'game changer' they wanted. Labor rates going up in China
means, more automation in the US. Its not a matter of them-vs-us jobs; its a
matter of cheap labor vs automation. And the smart money is on automation
today, since its growing explosively in manufacturing and warehousing.

------
foxhop
Also Related:

[https://plasticbank.org/](https://plasticbank.org/)

[http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle-
brick.html](http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle-brick.html)

~~~
spodek
I'm confused by Plasticbank. They seem to pay for plastic. While they divert
plastic from oceans, doesn't paying for plastic increase demand?

It sounds like the Cobra Effect --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)
\-- where paying for dead cobras, intending to lower their numbers, motivated
people to breed more, which increased their numbers.

------
algesten
Of the vegetables in the supermarket, the ecological / organic have the most
packaging. I find it ironic that if I want to use reusable bags to buy greens,
I am pretty much forced to go non-organic.

~~~
analog31
It strikes me that the packaging is to prevent you from getting the organic
goodies at the inorganic price.

------
convolvatron
impact on my neighborhood economy is severe. i don't know how much is the
chinese decision and how much other factors. but we used to have people who
regularly stopped by to pick up bulk cardboard and scrap metal. apparently
cardboard isn't worth anything at all anymore and we have to manage the impact
on our waste stream. and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb,
and id requirements have been toughened up to discourage theft, we can't even
get the homeless meth addicts to haul away steel anymore.

~~~
driverdan
> and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb

Since when? I'm pretty sure it's around $0.10/lb right now and stainless is
around $0.30/lb.

~~~
convolvatron
thats what we get for clean hot roll scrap around here. none of the people who
used to come by with trucks think that its worth the gas money any more. $0.10
is definitely worth gas money, so idk

------
snowpanda
One way this could be partially solved is with better technology. Like a
digital trashcan that analyzes your trash and alerts you/rejects your trash it
if it's not sorted correctly, maybe tell you what item wasn't recyclable. Just
brainstorming here. It would help me, because apparently I keep making
mistakes in what I think is recyclable and what isn't. Even though I read the
guidelines for years now.

~~~
cdolan
Search for CleanRobotics, they are building one in my city

------
spodek
Homo sapiens have existed hundreds of thousands of years without plastic.

13 hours this post has been up and almost no mention of reducing plastic
consumption. It costs zero, sends the signal upstream to produce less, and
solves all these problems.

How do we not even talk about using less?

I reduced packaged food by about 95% and found it _improved_ my life. My diet
became more delicious, convenient, and cheaper, based more on fresh
vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, and grains. Here's a video on
it: [http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-
podcast-5](http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5).

Here's a podcast episode on it: [http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-
spodek](http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-spodek).

It's been more than six months since I've emptied my landfill garbage and
months since I emptied my recycling. My compost, on the other hand, I empty a
couple times a month.

How is the headline for this story not: "It's past time we stop producing
garbage by 90%. It will improve your life"?

------
waibelp
I'm a little bit disappointed as the story just looks for new ways to get rid
of the plastic problem. Why not produce and use less plastic? In the EU some
countries ban plastic bags, others introduced or increased prices for bags. On
the other hand more paper bags are available and prices for them dropped, too,
resulting in more people using paper bags or starting to use cotton-bags.

~~~
evgen
The problem with solutions like this is that life is more complicated. Plastic
bags are easy and energy efficient to produce and to ship to the end-user.
Paper bags degrade incredibly poorly in the anaerobic environment of landfills
and they use more energy for shipping to the end-user. IIRC, a paper bag that
is not reused three times before being thrown away or recycled ends up using
more energy and resources than the plastic bags being banned, and a high-
density plastic bag needs to be reused 10 times, and a cloth bag needs to be
used 150+ times to be better than low density plastic bags.

~~~
adrianN
Paper bags may use more energy, but they dissolve in the ocean instead of
turning into microplastics and accumulating in the food chain.

~~~
evgen
They may dissolve in the ocean, but the US does not dump its garbage in the
ocean. When you put them in a landfill the last for a very long time. A very,
very long time. When people want to determine the age range from a core sample
of a landfill then just look for paper because it does not degrade in an
anaerobic environment.

------
hguhghuff
Send it to the next cheapest place to dump garbage outside a rich country.

Probably Africa ... someone there will surely be happy to take money to dump
first world "recycling" by a roadside.

What's really needed is a ban on exporting garbage/recycling from this
country, not a game of musical chairs whilst various countries ban
"importing".

Or just dump it in the Pacific Ocean .... oh hang on we already do.

------
evolve2k
>'CEO Steve Miller says the robot uses cameras and artificial intelligence to
separate recycling from trash "in the same way that a person would do it," but
faster and more accurately.'

This looks like an issue we could actually address.

What if every recycler world wide could get their hands on open source AI
sorting software and open robotics.

Anyone know of any open source projects along these lines?

------
pharke
This is a domino we should pay attention to.

------
candiodari
But ... if there was actual recycling (you know, re-using of materials) this
wouldn't be a problem ! This only makes sense if environmentalists
(politicians and activists) are lying about what recycling is. Either lying
outright, or lying by not doing basic checks on their claims of what gets
reused.

------
cdolan
Something interesting not discussed thus far:

Most glass that is sent to recycle, if broken and not directly re-usable, is
used as ‘daily cover’.

That means they grind it up into bits, then spread a 1” layer on top of the
landfill each day to help introduce stability, and start the decomposition
process.

------
Futurebot
This is probably a very good move. At some point, the clever marketing behind
"Keep America Beautiful" will lose its believability, and people will demand
what the creators behind KAB have been trying to avoid: corporate
responsibility for creating less wasteful products. What we have now, in the
form of the recycling industry and its associated regulations, are an
outsourcing of that responsibility to individual citizens, cities, and states.

Regulations in this area need to shift from recycling to sustainability.

"KAB downplayed industry's role in despoiling the earth, while relentlessly
hammering home the message of each person's responsibility for the destruction
of nature, one wrapper at a time. ....KAB was a pioneer in sowing confusion
about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption."

Then in the 80s the industry faced another challenge; the landfill crises that
led to recycling. Heather Rogers writes:

"All this eco-friendly activity put business and manufacturers on the
defensive. With landfill space shrinking, new incinerators ruled out, water
dumping long ago outlawed and the public becoming more environmentally aware
by the hour, the solutions to the garbage disposal problem were narrowing.
Looking forward, manufacturers must have perceived their range of options as
truly horrifying: bans on certain materials and industrial processes;
production controls; minimum standards for product durability."

"In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about
America’s garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating
production—for instance, requiring can and bottle makers to use refillable
containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the “litterbug” became
the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who
carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, “littering”
is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to
mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever
more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early
on didn’t realize what was happening until years later."

[https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-
design/recycl...](https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-
design/recycling-is-bullshit-make-nov-15-zero-waste-day-not-america-recycles-
day.html)

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-
lit...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-
campaigns/)

------
pwgorge
Part of the solution might be to ban the import of goods packaged in plastic.

------
crb002
Ship it to Nevada. Use solar powered smelters and centrifuges.

------
dis-sys
the biggest impact for some people reading Hacker News is that there is now a
pretty big uncertainty on those "second hand" Xeon processors you purchase on
ebay.

~~~
lucaspiller
If anything I’d say this will increase the supply of second hand hardware, as
it will be cheaper to resell it, than break it down and recycle it.

------
Feniks
Us Europeans use Africa.

There was a scandal with chemical waste killing a few Africans couple of years
back.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_dump)

I think that countries should take care of their own waste. That's what we get
taught as kids right? Clean up after yourself.

------
PeachPlum
Britain's largest export, by volume, is waste paper / cardboard. It _was_
going to China and coming back as cardboard.

~~~
Manglano
At least, properly separated, it degrades and can be reprocessed into more
paper and cardboard. The US exports CRT televisions and chipsets for
electronics with such minimal production quality as to be considered destined-
for-disposal.

In some regions, pirated materials derived from metals, petrochemicals, and
advanced dyes are immediately destroyed and shoveled into landfills:
[http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-
rollers-c...](http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers-
crush-nearly-two-million-pieces-of-pirated-news-
photo/51341789?esource=SEO_GIS_CDN_Redirect)

The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big
way...

~~~
Aloha
I'd love to buy more of my stuff in glass.

~~~
Manglano
Even something as simple as being able to have a clerk fill my jar with a
weight of instant coffee would cut down my recycling mass by an average of
about 50g per week and eliminate some plastic. Glass doesn't have a limit on
recycle phases if handled correctly but all plastic other than PLA has a
pretty short recycle lifetime.

