
Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble. How does it work? - nikbackm
https://mashable.com/2018/08/18/how-recycling-works/
======
Animats
Automated recycling is coming along well. Here's a typical modern plant in the
UK.[1] Sorting is mechanized, with tumble drums, vibratory sorters, and
magnets doing most of the work. Permanent magnets pull ferrous metal out. AC
magnets pull aluminum out. Vision systems, often multispectral, look at the
presorted materials as they go by on a fast belt and use air jets to kick out
certain types of items. This is standard technology.

There's still some manual picking involved in most plants. Robots are taking
that over at a few plants.[2]

Aluminum is the moneymaker. Plastic bottles can go to a plant that turns them
back into pellets for making new bottles.[3] A huge plant now serves southern
California. Not clear this makes money.

Waste paper isn't that valuable. "Peak paper" was a while back, and US paper
mills have been closing for years. It's not that sorting is hard, it's that
the product is so low-value.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Waste paper isn't that valuable.

Plain white office paper might not be so valuable, but cardboard remains
valuable enough that in Eastern Europe you can see marginalized communities
like the Roma collecting it daily. I have seen recycling centers advertise
payments like 0.50€/kg in exchange for cardboard, which seems pretty high.

------
yodon
When my kids were young, they went on a field trip to a recycling plant. As a
parent, the most interesting discovery was the sorting facility we visited
didn't sort plastic by type because you can't expect people earning minimum
wage to sort LDPE from HDPE from etc. So what did the big commercial recycling
facility do? They sorted plastic by shape. Things shaped like cups and bowls
were sorted as trash, things not shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as
recyclable. It was pretty clear at that point recycling plastic was just a for
show activity.

~~~
jimnotgym
But plastic is effectively recycled in lots of places in the world. Just
because that plant sucked it doesn't mean all do. Add to that the commercial
plastic waste, pallet wrap for instance is already separated when it is sold
to the recyclers.

Better than all that of course is re-use. When I was a child, in the UK, large
glass bottles of lemonade had a 20p deposit, refundable on return. I believe I
believe it is still common in Germany. This went away in the UK because large
super-markets didn't want the hassle of dealing with returns, IIRC

~~~
ianai
I’d like to see fewer plastic items all around. There’s no reason a store must
sell me a container in addition to the goods I buy.

~~~
stephengillie
It complicates transportation to sell all goods in bulk. I'm glad that stores
don't charge an extra 1.5 cents for the plastic bag around every gallon of
milk and pound of rice.

You, yourself, might have enough responsibility and self-control to prioritize
cleaning your containers, but this is not true for all humans. The store would
lose business if their competitor sold milk already in bags or boxes, but you
had to bring your own milk bag to their store. And someone's bags might have
bacterial or other contaminants and get them sick, then they blame the store
and get the health department to shut them down. (Tangent: Why is most milk
still sold in boxes, and not in plastic?)

Glass is fragile, metals cause unexpected chemical reactions, wood is
permeable & requires additional materials (wax, glue) to seal properly, and
cardboard has poor durability.

~~~
lovich
I think he might be referencing things like shrink wrapped banannas, or
plastic boxes around Tupperware containers, or when you buy a bag of something
and every single individual piece has it's own wrapping inside the bag.

There is a lot of completely unnecessary packaging that companies use because
it gets them a 0.02% increase in profit and they don't have to pay the actual
costs of the plastic pollution they are creating

~~~
ianai
There’s not going to be one solution to all things. That’s a strawman
argument.

I’m for allowing for ways to not use so much plastic. The technology exists -
for instance, the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me
one at a time and at the time they leave their container. It’d take take some
doing, but it’s doable. For people not willing or able to provide a container
then sell them the old plastic covered cubes of oatmeal in boxes two at a
time. And charge them more.

~~~
stephengillie
> _the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me one at a
> time and at the time they leave their container._

The Internet of Things can help this to become a reality, with sensors on the
box lid and an internet connection. Why charge a customer only once when you
can charge them twice?

~~~
ianai
I’ll rephrase:

could be charged to me one at a time when they leave their container

~~~
stephengillie
When you buy the box of oatmeal cubes, you're buying the right to buy oatmeal
cubes. When you remove them from the container is when you actually purchase
the cubes.

Similar to a Costco card, or buying a phone to access apps in the app store.

------
grecy
It's worth remembering Recycling is the _least_ good thing we should be doing.

1\. Reduce

2\. Reuse

3\. Recycle

I always find it interesting in developing countries to see tons and tons of
stuff being reused, _way_ more than in Developed countries. i.e. A 1 liter
beer bottle in Ecuador is $0.75 for the beer, and $1 deposit on the glass. The
bottles are cleaned and reused hundreds of times.

~~~
orev
Yes, by far! Everyone fixated on recycling because it was the only option that
didn’t require people to make real changes in their lives (and it’s amazing
how much resistance there is/was to simply putting things in a few different
bins). Now that China has decided to no longer be the world’s garbage dump,
those chickens are going to come home to roost real quick.

------
garyrichardson
Why not push the burden back onto the companies providing the goods in
packages? If Walmart (or it's suppliers) had to prepay for the handling of the
waste the products they sell come in you'd probably see a significant
reduction in packaging.

~~~
rapnie
In The Netherlands we had a Packaging Tax for supermarkets for a while (it has
been repealed after a short time, because of resistance and lobbying).

I liked the idea, except there was a problem (IMHO) in how it was implemented,
because there was no requirement to show the tax amount that was charged to
the consumer on their receipt.

If your receipt would say e.g. 'Groceries $30.00, Plastic tax: $2.05' then a
consumer would have a real incentive to lower the amount of tax by choosing
better packaging with less plastic.

------
novia
For anyone wondering why China doesn't want our plastics any more, here's a
nice documentary:

[https://youtu.be/ooRVhRt1p54](https://youtu.be/ooRVhRt1p54)

~~~
gl00pp
Shit Son, that was real.

I have always thought that recycling is a scam. That it really only makes
sense for things like glass and some metals. But everyone is caught up in the
feel goodness and if you don't you're some kind of animal.

I say put everything in the landfill, we will one day harvest it and all that
resource will be in one place!

~~~
ars
> That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals.

Only metal (all metals). Recycled Glass is worthless, and is crushed and used
as landfill cover.

------
vinni2
Just wondering why burning it to produce energy isn’t considered in US. Many
countries like Sweden have managed to completely get rid of garbage this way
[0].

[0] [https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-
out-...](https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-out-of-
garbage-imports-from-other-countries/article16795374.ece)

------
paulcole
I really don’t see the point of recycling.

These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce my impact on the planet: eating a
plant-based diet, never traveling by plane and only rarely by car (I never
learned to drive and the vast majority of my travel during the year is by
bicycle, public transit or foot), never having kids, and living in a small
apartment.

Does separating my glass and plastic jars really make that much of an
additional difference?

~~~
cc439
There really hasn't been any point to recycling paper, plastic, and glass for
quite some time now. Recycling glass hasn't made sense ever since local
bottling plants ceased to exist in most cities, removing the system by which
they were able to re-use recycled bottles. Recycling paper is obviously no
longer a sensible activity given the issues of contamination and lack of
economic incentives given just how cheap sustainably harvested wood has
become. Plastic, well plastic would make sense if we could ever figure out how
to sort all the different types automatically. The re-use of recycled plastic
is basically limited to a handful of common product types (plastic bottles
that are either HDPE or PET and easily identifiable as such).

That said, one should always make an effort to recycle aluminum properly.
There's a reason aluminum is often referred to as "solidified electricity" and
it's because it takes enormous amounts of energy to extract aluminum from raw
ore. Recycling finished aluminum goods cuts out that entire step of the
production chain and has an enormous impact on large-scale energy consumption.

~~~
lurquer
Recycling is a way to profit off of virtue signaling. Why should I separate my
trash to make some recycling company more profitable? If they pay me enough, I
might do it. Otherwise, it's all going into the landfill.

Even aluminum.

If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough --
they can go dig it up.

I dislike companies making profits on forced labor. Too many virtue-signaling
municipalities mandate recycling (and sometimes even charges you for pickup)
just so some recycling company can increase its bottom line. Nonsense. Bury
everything. It's cheap.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough --
> they can go dig it up.

The point of recycling aluminium is that is avoids the enormous energy
expenditures and carbon of processing raw ore. So, recycling is a sensible
step towards environmental protection. It might “make a company some money”,
but your failing to do it still has environmental consequences. And if a
company had to go “dig it up”, there would probably still be more carbon
generated than if you just sorted your rubbish.

~~~
PeterisP
I'm reading the parent post's argument as less against recycling as such but
rather against trash sorting by the general population.

I.e. if recycling aluminium saves more resources than it cost in labor/effort,
then it should be economically profitable to do so with _the recycling
company_ doing the sorting of that aluminium out of trash or even digging it
up from the landfill instead of processing raw ore.

If recycling something is profitable only if subsidized by free sorting labor
from the general population, then it seems like a signal that it's not
actually worth it to spend that labor on it, if reusing that material is so
worthless compared to the effort it takes to sort it; so (depending on local
economics) it may be that it's good to recycle scrap metal and aluminium and
worthless to recycle paper or some types of plastic.

~~~
ubercow13
The effort it takes to sort it out from the rest of your trash once it's mixed
in with your diapers and whatever else probably isn't equivalent to the effort
of you sorting it in the first place, though

------
rapjr9
What is holding back plasma gasification? [https://waste-management-
world.com/a/plasma-gasification-cle...](https://waste-management-
world.com/a/plasma-gasification-clean-renewable-fuel-through-vaporization-of-
waste)

------
Iwan-Zotow
Wrong title. Should be "Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble.
How it doesn't work"

~~~
rasz
Wrong title. Should be "Pretending to Recycle while shipping garbage to China
wont work any longer"

------
zengid
That trash smells like opportunity [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/an-uber-
for-garbage-picks-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/an-uber-for-garbage-
picks-up-steam-and-11-7-million-in-series-a-funding/)

------
tomohawk
China's just not a reliable trading partner. They use trade as a weapon. It's
got countries such as Malaysia reconsidering their interactions.

[http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-
for-...](http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-for-dealing-
with-china/)

That's too bad, as the Chinese people are industrious and creative, and
together we stand a better chance of making the best use of waste.

~~~
08-15
Might be China is just tired of buying waste. Yes, waste, not "recyclables".
Even if plastic and paper were clean and perfectly sorted by type, you still
couldn't really recycle them like you can recycle metals and glass. It's
always downcycling.

~~~
fspeech
Another reason is that China wants its domestic recycling (meaning curbside
collection) industry to develop. While the processing industry can get cheaper
input through importing, it lessens the interest in collecting domestic
sources, generating more pollution or waste for the landfills.

