
Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It - Bostonian
https://www.wsj.com/articles/recycling-rethink-what-to-do-with-trash-now-china-wont-take-it-11576776536
======
Animats
Automated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human
pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's
companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different
kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and
bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as
"automated quality control units". The mechanical and air systems do most of
the separation; the robots just grab stuff that was mis-sorted by the other
systems.

The main vision systems are now fast enough that sorters work by moving
objects on a wide, fast belt where they go flying off the end. While in
flight, multispectral cameras look at the objects, using both reflected and
transmitted light, and within milliseconds trigger air jets to blow items in
the desired direction. Most robotics videos from startups are sped up because
the thing is so slow. The ones from commercially successful sorting companies
are slowed down so you can see what's happening.

The problem is what to do with the sorted stuff. It's just not very valuable.
It's possible to recycle plastic bottles all the way back to more plastic
bottles. A huge plant near LA does this for most of southern California.
States that charge a recycling fee for containers can handle it, but those
that don't...

~~~
GeoffIsTheBest
I was part of a software project for BHS several years ago. We were taking the
cad models for a entire plant and rendering them in the web with
info/marketing media for each module. The speed that they could sort material
at different stages was incredible. I don't remember seeing a single "robotic
arm" picking anything. It was all air and mechanical sorting. Very cool stuff.
They should have videos of most their modules on their site for the curious.

~~~
Animats
The first recycling robot was installed only three years ago.[1] There's been
considerable progress since then. BHS is now installing and reselling the MAX-
AI robotic picker, which seems to be a recent addition to their product line.
This is out of the experimental stage and in use at high-volume sites.
Expensive up front, about $200K each and $160K for installation and
integration. Each one replaces about 2 people, plus the robots can run 2 or 3
shifts, so payback time is maybe 3 years.

There are some VC-funded companies in this area, but the vision/AI part is
pretty much solved. It's getting the mechanical systems to be robust enough in
a very dirty environment that's hard.

The big insight is that most of the separation has to be done by cheaper
processes operating on the bulk material stream. The robotic system is just to
pull out stuff that didn't get sorted correctly by screens, drums, shakers,
magnets, blowers, and vision-based air jet sorters. An all-robot system is too
slow and too expensive, but quality control robots for getting from 5%
contamination to 0.5% contamination are cost-effective. Here's a good video of
the whole process.[2] 70 tons an hour.

That makes it possible to get contamination levels down to China's new
standards and the ones of US plants which can use the stuff. "Because of
China's voracious appetite for all types of U.S. scrap exports over the past
20 years, MRFs "had the luxury of being able to sell the mixed rigid plastics
[and] mixed paper without a lot of sorting and quality control." ... "Some
materials are up in price … PET is actually increasing. It's a supply and
demand thing," Butler said. "For the most part, if you can separate that
material, there are domestic markets for that right now."[3]

So, in the recycling industry, some are whining about China's policies and
others are fixing the problem, shipping products, and making money. It's small
and medium sized cities that can't keep up. The big cities have big plants
with multiple 70 ton per hour processing lines with the machinery running 2
shifts a day, and direct deals with companies that can use the plastics,
metals, etc. A small town doesn't generate enough recycling to do that, and
trucking unsorted material long distances is too expensive.

[1] [https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2019/05/07/how-
recy...](https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2019/05/07/how-recycling-
robots-have-spread-across-north-america/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/4FpsH_ETT7c](https://youtu.be/4FpsH_ETT7c)

[3] [https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-
standard-...](https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-standard-
MRFs/519659/)

~~~
GeoffIsTheBest
Very insightful and cool to hear about new tech making it into the MRFs. I was
impressed back in~2014 so I bet there are way neater techniques now days.

------
ethbro
Personally, I'm happy that personal recycling hit a bump when China rejected
dirty channels.

It was marketed in the 80s-00s as more of a panacea than it is, and
specifically seems to have inculcated a dangerously willful ignorance of
further action. I.e. "I already do the recycling thing, so I do my part."

From why I can tell, the toxicity, micro-plastic, and energy concerns are the
primary mass-scale benefits? In that order?

The majority of which could be reaped at scale by funding toxic material
collection programs, mandating less toxic material choices, and re-instituting
a bottle tax+.

In return, we've let major, industrial-scale environmental catastrophes go
unmitigated, because out of sight, out of mind.

From my reading, the 1970s push for recycling was always predicated as a
_vanguard_ movement, intended to educate the populace at large about
environmental issues.

The expectation was that we would then pivot to tackle more difficult
problems.

Instead, we have 50 years of patting ourselves on the back for hauling
cardboard out to our suburban recycling containers.

\+ Looking at you, Coke and Pepsi, for fighting bottle taxes around the world.

~~~
grecy
It always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud
they recycle.

Recycling is the _worst_ good thing we should be doing.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order.

I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have
extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

~~~
javajosh
_> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse
programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well._

In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse
programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want,
avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local
supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, although
they won't give you your deposit - which seems like a very fair deal to me.

The one odd exception is milk. A classic example of American container reuse,
but I don't see any milk sold in glass in Germany.

~~~
_Microft
Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this:

[https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image...](https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/images/2019/03/12/spar_natur_pur_bergbauern_bio-
milch_jetzt_in_der_mehrweg-glasflasche.jpg)

From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this),
there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

~~~
stinos
This used to exist, and was even fairly common, in many countries. Moreover it
was brought to your door by the milkman. And that milkman sometimes also had
eggs and even vegetables from local farmers. This disappeared, driven by
economics/capitalism/'supermarket=freedom'/..., not because it's bad per se.
In fact there's quite some benefits to that whole system from an ecological
point of view.

Which leads to sort of funny situations: locally it's been about 20 years
since the milkman made his last round. Now there's again a company starting to
do a similar thing (bring bottled milk/juice, local farmer's products to your
door weekly) and some people who don't know better consider it revolutionary,
and the poor company can't keep up with demand :)

~~~
mattrp
Well I do find it interesting that last mile grocery delivery is kind of like
a modern day milkman..

------
mirimir
If only three plastics were used in packaging -- say, polyethylene,
polyethylene terephthalate and polycarbonate -- recycling would be much
easier. If they're clean and well separated, they can just be reused. Iffy
polyethylene makes great "lumber" for decks, or roofing tiles. Iffy
polyethylene terephthalate is great for fleece. Iffy polycarbonate plus carbon
black is great for structural applications.

~~~
swiley
PLA is pretty awesome as far as recycling goes. Also I’m under the impression
that cellophane (the “plastic” used for food packaging) is digestible by
earthworms. I’m not sure restricting things like that makes sense.

~~~
the-dude
As far as I know, cellophane burns clean.

------
pythux
This is a source of anxiety for me lately. We use plastic everywhere and yet
seem to not know what to do with it. Plastic is cheap they say, but would
plastic be so cheap if we had to factor in the price of recycling it or at
least handling its after life? Would it be realistic to ask to think about
what to do with wastes of the products sold?

~~~
lacker
The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it
were added to the cost of plastic.

The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change.
Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend
your worrying energy on something else.

~~~
noisem4ker
I can't help but think that filling the earth with trash is not the correct
solution to the problem, however convenient it may be.

~~~
thirstywhimbrel
Landfills are tiny relative to usable land and are eventually just capped and
turned into parks.

Most of the popular fear about running out of landfill space can be traced
back to a misused statistic about small rural landfills being decommissioned.
RCRA Subtitle D regs basically have driven the shutdown of old town dumps.
Modern landfills are much more efficient, with better safety controls for
leaching and gas capture, better compression and sorting, and even processes
that speed decomposition. The headlines will scream that the number of
available landfills are dropping rapidly and neglect to mention that total
capacity is actually up and total disposed volume has been trending down since
2000, even despite population increases.

Highly recommend touring a landfill and learning about waste management at
scale.

There are really interesting engineering dilemmas that are always a step more
nuanced than "we must use x solution or fill the world with trash."

~~~
randycupertino
Don't landfills leech lots of pollutants into the groundwater and nearby
environment?

~~~
thirstywhimbrel
Efficient leachate control is an interesting area, but there are various
families of techniques to do it and methods for monitoring effectiveness that
have emerged from the last several decades of focused study.

Current facilities are way better equipped than the old solution of
uncontrolled municipal dumps.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a
landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they
report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes
bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is
the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal

~~~
thirstywhimbrel
> leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a
> landfill

A lot of these fixes are more expensive to fake to code than to just
implement, and isolating sources of groundwater pollution can take a few
years, but not decades. Also a lot of these people live there and know the
risks to their kids' safety.

The environmental engineers who consult on these projects didn't generally go
into the field to poison people.

------
songshuu
Make hills, heat homes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjido](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjido)

~~~
jacob019
Yes. When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the
landfill. A properly managed landfill is a perfectly responsible way to
dispose of plastic. Get the oil from the ground, make it into useful things,
then put it back when we're done.

~~~
catalogia
> _When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the
> landfill._

In the 80s from what I understand, in response to the Mobro 4000 incident:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-
to-90s-e...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-
to-90s-environmentalism/)

------
aazaa
> As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89%
> since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many
> categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the
> Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to
> all countries were down 64% in that time period, while mixed paper exports
> were down 42% according to ISRI.

The article doesn't clearly explain why the shift has happened. It does point
out:

> ... China ... wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the
> flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard.

And later:

> China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers
> to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors
> little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable
> junk stateside.

Have wages in China really risen so quickly that human garbage sorters are now
too expensive? That seems unlikely, and the article gives no evidence for it.

An alternative explanation might be that the plastic was never recycled in the
first place. It's more than just sorting. Each container has a residue of
liquid/solid stuff that can't possibly be compatible with low-cost material
recycling.

What if the material received by China was actually burned instead to generate
energy rather than new containers? That might explain the newfound reluctance
of China to take the stuff.

~~~
mulmen
Are you suggesting China was just burning all the recyclables? If so why did
they stop?

~~~
bobthepanda
China has a massive pollution problem.

If China were to burn all recyclables in a manner consistent with the rest of
their industrialization, the process probably wasn’t very clean.

China could invest in cleaner recycling processes, but a quick way to reduce a
problem is to reduce its scope, and banning imports of recyclable material is
certainly a quick way to do that, everyone else be damned.

(I don’t really think China burnt all of it, but if they did and stopped this
would be why.)

~~~
abhiyerra
I read in an article a majority of the Pacific Garbage Patch likely comes from
this discarded plastic.

Can’t cite at the moment...

------
aSplash0fDerp
Its the industries and businesses with the plastic addiction problem, not the
consumer.

This is similar to making a bad long-term bet and having to pay up. There are
a lot of other attractive choices to plastic, but the window to transition
seemlessly appears to be closing more and more each week.

Seeing the death of coal should give them a map to follow. They made a bad bet
on the future too.

~~~
techslave
it’s a tragedy of the commons problem. plastic is essentially free, so once
one manufacturer can make the same consumer quality product with plastic
instead of [whatever else], it forces the hands of all other manufacturers.

this needs to be solved with regulation.

~~~
jdnenej
The simple solution is to move the disposal cost to the producer. Instead of
the consumer paying taxes to dispose of the product, the producer must pay and
now a producer which produces less waste can sell cheaper products.

~~~
HorstG
There is such a system in Germany, called Grüner Punkt or Duales System. They
tax manufacturers' packaging and run the collection and recycling from that
tax income.

Imho it didn't help all that much. I did not find numbers for the reduction in
packaging, but my impresssion is "none". As for recycling the waste they
collect, there are numbers between "half is just icinerated" and "only 5% is
recycled":
[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duales_System_(Abfallwirtsch...](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duales_System_\(Abfallwirtschaft\))

------
neonate
[http://archive.md/75IhQ](http://archive.md/75IhQ)

------
205guy
More and more I'm starting to think that people must be responsible for their
entire trash output. Every thing you buy, from food to electronics to cars and
even houses, you are responsible for: food scraps, packaging, recyclable
materials, e-waste, old appliances, scrap vehicles, etc.

You are are responsible for having near-zero footprint in your life, where
this number should be universal for rich and poor alike. You must bear
whatever effort or cost to live within this footprint. You must make choices
to not acquire things that will become trash and you must take steps to ensure
what you need to dispose of goes into proper channels. You will probably want
collective solutions to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. You also need
regulations to handle compliance and governments to ensure the fair
application thereof. Yes, this is an expensive ideal, yet the opposite seems
hard to justify morally.

Current modern life is using fossil energy, natural resources, and land area
on Earth to live a life of ease and deferred responsibility. Just because
there is still space to make landfills and air/soil not yet saturated with
pollutants, what right do we have to take it?

The way this might be similar to CO2 "waste" is an exercise left to the
reader.

------
jrs235
I'm trying to figure out if it still makes sense to sort out the plastics
before burying them. Make dedicated plastic landfills separate from all the
other rubbish. Then when we find an efficient way to reuse it we will know
where in the ground a ton of it is rather than having to open a mixed rubbish
fill land fill then clean and process ALL the garbage to sort the plastic out.
Seems to me that presorting before burying is a better use of energy and
resources.

~~~
whatshisface
If sorting technology gets better over time, why even bother presorting before
burying? It would be cheaper to bury and them sort in the future. Maybe
conventional landfills, with adequate attention paid to leak prevention, were
the smartest solution all along.

~~~
catalogia
Planning on uncapping the landfill in the future restricts what you can put on
top of it in the meantime. Whether or not that's really an issue probably
depends on how much free space your country has laying around.

------
mirimir
Damn, I hate those two paragraph articles. Damn lazy writers.

Edit: This is all that Firefox Reader View shows. No explanation. Just this:

> Recycling Rethink: What to Do With Trash Now That China Won’t Take It

> Saabira Chaudhuri

> 1 minute

> For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used
> plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then
> shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest
> consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.

> That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic
> and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate
> domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an
> environmental and...

Another edit: I would subscribe, if I could. I mean, just 1 EUR per quarter.
But they want a credit card, and Mirimir has no credit cards. And expecting me
to trust their discretion, if I shared my meatspace identity, would be
foolish. But even trying for anonymous credit cards violates KYC law, and
isn't worth the risk just to read WSJ.

~~~
neonate
That's because the paywalled text ends there. The article has 18 paragraphs.

[http://archive.md/75IhQ](http://archive.md/75IhQ)

~~~
mirimir
Thanks :)

------
sjwright
There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%.

If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed
from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket.

And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to
the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Illegal dumping and increased spending on policing would be the result.

~~~
sjwright
True, but the upsides would massively offset the downsides.

~~~
filesystem
Burning trash is an environmental nightmare.
[https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/html/i...](https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/web/html/index-3.html)

------
Arete314159
We need legislation and consumer pressure to force companies not to use
plastic, and to create closed systems a la the old milkman bottle system.

------
vegetish
Bighead thought: Can't we just melt everything down to a big soup and suck out
the different fractions/layers and then further chemically and/or mechanically
separate all the stuff that sticks together?

~~~
wongarsu
Most plastics become unusable when they are heated.

The simplest workable system would be to burn everything (producing
electricity) and filter the metals from the ashes.

------
macspoofing
Is it that hard to figure it out? Bury it or burn it.

------
6510
If it has no purpose, why are you making it?

