
Drowning in Garbage - aagha
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/global-waste/
======
rabboRubble
For anybody interested in the totality of their garbage output, I can't
recommend this book enough:

[https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Land-Secret-Trail-
Trash/dp/03...](https://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Land-Secret-Trail-
Trash/dp/031615461X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1)?

I had my book club read this book, and so many times, for so many other books
this books came up in conversation.

Interesting facts:

* Glass is recycled in order to grind it up and spread it over landfills to keep down dust. In this way the glass is counted as recycled and not garbage despite it ended up being in the dump.

* Roman era landfills are still leaking effluant.

* Plastics might be marked and marketed as recyclable but many plastics are better off as garbage. Better yet, never created and used in the first place.

* Whenever a natural compost toilet has a problem, more sawdust is almost always the answer to fixing whatever ails it. (Not really in the book, one of our bookclub members had hippie parents).

I would follow up this book with another set in Mumbai:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067553/ref=as_li_ss_tl](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400067553/ref=as_li_ss_tl)

Somehow we need to do a better job at reducing poverty and imroving consumer
recycling habits. No miracle solutions in this book. Just griding, abject
poverty, living in the garbage of Mumbai.

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gumby
> Is this just garbage, or is it a resource?

About 10 years ago I looked at using engineered extremophile bacteria to mine
metals from dumps. The tech was complex but doable even then and there were
other things we could have done too in terms of remediation.

What killed it? Local government. They pay to manage and maintain dumps. I
offered to take over their “brownfield” sites and change their cost center
into a revenue stream. Everyone I talked to thought it would be a great
idea...but wanted so much in royalties that it would not be worth doing.
They’d rather strangle the goose.

~~~
gregw134
Could you give us an idea of how that could work? I can't even begin to
imagine how that could be done.

~~~
gumby
Briefly:

1: grind up the middens (sorry archeologists!)

2: put the resulting slurry in a bioreactor (an open tank would work) with
your bacteria and stir for a while

3: rinse and drain tank. Spin down the rinsate.

4\. Profit!

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tmnvix
In our moral crusade against impending environmental disaster, it astounds me
that packaging is still given little thought beyond what we should do with it
once we already have it. I think it would be a good idea to place some kind of
rating on packaging to encourage purchasers to be more cognisant of what they
are actually taking responsibility for beyond just the contents.

I can't help but feel like we are going backwards here - especially when I see
things like individual bananas being sold on trays[1].

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/WPaVBTv.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/WPaVBTv.jpg)

~~~
titzer
In Germany consumers are legally allowed to unpackage items directly in the
store and the store is required to handle the leftover packaging.

~~~
ndh2
Very few people do that, though. Certainly not enough for the stores to do
anything about packaging.

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visarga
AI can help us here. This is an example of automated trash sorting (optical
sorting) from 4 years ago. I expect today we can sort trash even more
efficienty:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc)

Another idea would be an army of cleaning bots that can be let loose in a
forest, on a beach or on roadside to methodically collect all trash. Even
underwater drones could be used to clean up beaches. I think cleaning bots is
the way forward.

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bob_theslob646
I really appreciate the authors of this post for their effort in raising
awareness but I think it will fall on deaf ears.

A few things that they mentioned that they didn't go into crazy depth are
origination of plastic(s), transportation costs of waste, and taxation as a
policy to reduce waste.

Did you know that glass is reusable, unfortunately it's so heavy that it's
worth nothing to recycle.

The other problem is where the funding for recycling goes.

In the New York City metro area, a bottle deposit tax is used towards
education. If everyone recycles, where/how is the government going to plug
that hole, however small it may be?

The better question that the author should be asking is what type of policy(s)
should be implemented in order to make it so that people want to or are forced
to reuse verses to not even think about throwing things out.

The only conclusion that I see is a super high tax.

Unfortunately,most people don't really care unless it hits them in the wallet.

You would be suprised. You could make the fines incredibly high or jail people
like they do in Singapore.

If Singapore can do it, why can't New York City?

~~~
Spooky23
I think the failure to reuse glass is a failure of imagination.

Why not have consumers refill product? Get your shampoo refilled at a machine
in the aisle. Tax the plastic bottle.

~~~
wincy
You would have to make it punitively expensive for that to sway me. I pay $10
for a giant bottle of shampoo from Costco, if it suddenly became $10 + $5
plastic bottle tax I'd probably still just pay the $15 rather than refill the
bottle.

~~~
mattmanser
The evidence is overwhelmingly against you[1], given how the plastic bag tax
in Ireland and now the UK has shown it does significantly increase reuse, even
for nominal amounts like a 5p charge per bag.

You might not want to save money, but most consumers do.

You're falling into the trap of "everyone is exactly like me", where you're in
fact the exception, not the norm.

[1][https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-
plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced)

~~~
esrauch
I think bags are quite different: the hassle of reusable bags is really low,
they weigh almost nothing, and they have other real advantages over the
plastic bags (they don't break).

Many US states have bottle deposits for a similar "nominal" amount per bottle
and the majority of people don't do it: when I was a broke college student
some friends and I did it for a little while but the math really didn't work
out even then.

~~~
mattmanser
My Aunt & Uncle and in Holland did it all the time and as far as I could tell
everyone did it (I'm from UK, we don't have a scheme like that).

In this article after a very quick google they report a 90% return rate in
Holland (I'm not going to spend time digging into where the 90% comes from):

[http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69](http://www.greenglass.org.hk/en/?p=69)

So it might be a cultural thing or it may be the deposit figure is too low. As
far as I remember in Holland it was 10 cents when I was a kid in the 90s,
which would be about a dime per bottle.

~~~
esrauch
It certainly is cultural: in Switzerland the rate of recycling is extremely
high without and deposit.

To clarify, in my experience what happens in the US is most people recycle
bottles at curbside pickup, rather than drive somewhere to get 5 cents per
can. In cities homeless tend to go around and collect all of the cans from the
curb and redeem them.

~~~
s3nnyy
This is not only cultural and has nothing to do with the Swiss being more
ethical or better people.

As always, in Switzerland _the system_ is very smart: The main reason for the
high recycling rate in Switzerland is that a 35 liter trash bag costs around
80 cents. The cost for the garbagemen etc. is included in the purchase price
of the trash-bag. (Also, the trash-bag is of high-quality and never rips, so
garbagemen who get a >4000 CHF monthly salary, almost never waste time picking
up trash from ripped trash-bags.)

This is unbelievably smart because this nudges people recycle everything:
Paper, carton, glas, metal, and plastic bottles are all thrown away in extra
containers that are distributed conveniently within the neighbourhoods. People
really fill the expensive, high-quality trash-bags mostly with non-recyclable
stuff. If you put in recyclable stuff there is no punishment or anything, you
just have to buy more bags, which hurts your pocket.

Compare that to Germany where they rolled out a machinary of expensive
plastic-bottle-bar-code reading robots in each and every supermarket that had
to be engineered, maintained and protected against tampering/hacking/fraud
with false bottles (from Eastern Europe).

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nicolas_t
> On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month.
> In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much

That surprised me with the quantity of garbage due to overpacking in Japan,
I'd have expected more. For example, I just bought 2 salads to eat at home,
each salad is in a plastic container with some ice sticked to it and enveloped
separately in a plastic bag. Then those two salads are in a plastic bag. It's
an amazing amount of waste for no real reason.

~~~
Joe-Z
Plastic bags don't really weigh that much. Maybe Americans use a little less
plastic bags (do they, though?) but throw away more other stuff, like plastic
gadget crap.

~~~
titzer
Having personally dug hundreds, perhaps thousands of those evil little fuckers
out of the sands of beaches all over the world, I would say that gram for gram
these are one of the worst kinds of pollution man has created.

Plastic shopping bags are a real bitch when they get into the sand. They often
fill up with sand and become like a 10kg buried beachball. One literally needs
to dig completely under them to get them out without tearing them up and
leaving part of the bag under the sand. All of those plastic bags basically
glue together the beach so that the normal erosive action of the sand being
moved around by tides and waves no longer grinds things up like it normally
would. That means the whole beach gets stagnant and rotten like a swamp.
Really nasty.

~~~
Joe-Z
Oh sure, I despise the ubiquitous hand-outs of plastic bags as much as anyone,
I was just making that comment to give a reason for the weight-difference in
spite of the perceived over-usage of packaging in Japan. I make it a point to
refuse plastic bags whenever possible (which is pretty much always). I find it
incredible that they are still considered the standard mode for packaging your
shit. If shops would only give them out when asked for it, the number of used
plastic bags would surely plummet.

One anecdote I found amusing is when I was in Yosemite: I bought a couple of
t-shirts and told the lady at the check-out she doesn't need to give me a
plastic bag for them, since I have my backpack with me anyways. She was
pleasantly surprised and thanked me. It's one of the most well-known national
parks in the US, where they make it a point to educate people on taking care
of your environment, yet they hand out plastic bags with every purchase in the
souvenir shop.

~~~
CaptainZapp
The two major retailers in Switzerland started to charge ~ 5 cents for those
small, crappy plastic baggies.

Usage went back by ~ 80%.

~~~
esrauch
On the other hand there is still a lot of packaging per good in Switzerland: a
lot more things are sold individually wrapped in plastic (cucumbers, peppers,
etc) and things like baking soda are sold in much smaller packets.

~~~
CaptainZapp
Both, cucumbers and peppers are usually sold open. With the exception of
organic produce.

That's so that the cashier is able to make the distinction, since prices for
organics are usually higher.

Usually, because there are exceptions, like a three pack of peppers. Fennel
also comes often pre-packed. Other veggies usually not.

That's not to say that not a lot more could be done.

What I tried to do with my comment is to pôint out that a tiny fee can really
change behavior.

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sevensor
When we moved to a house in an area with municipal composting, we were amazed
by how much our trash volume was reduced by diverting compostable materials to
the compost stream. Some of that is food waste, but a lot of it is things
you'd never consume -- vegetable peels, eggshells, old coffee grounds, even
food-soiled unwaxed corrugated cardboard (i.e. pizza boxes). On any given
week, it's half or more by volume, and well over half by weight.

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thisisit
Unrelated but the scrolling on site is super weird. Clicking on Lagos takes to
the top of the page.

~~~
gumby
Not really unrelated — if the article is hard to read it’s a problem. And
what’s with the scrolling that sends small “fortune cookie” messages scrolling
across the photos? That all simply distracts from the article and makes you
have to find your place again. Sad.

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artur_makly
we need to get more clever with this elephant in the room. some startup needs
to come up with a Garbage > Energy solution. The rest can maybe go into making
bricks for construction.

its a slow boil and we are not focused

~~~
theandrewbailey
Aren't those called incinerators? We have those.

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jimrandomh
Looking at the numbers, I just don't see a real problem here. Landfill is
three dimensional, and can be built on top of; it would take quite a lot of
orders of magnitude population growth before we started running low on places
to put it.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Landfills emit gases and things collapse as the waste changes over time. They
aren't perfect foundations for future construction.

