
The World's Recycling Is in Chaos. Here's What Has to Happen - howard941
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos-heres-what-has-to-happen/
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NoblePublius
What’s the past year has shown us is that “we” never were recycling. We were
just sending our garbage to China and they’ve had enough of it. The entire
concept of postconsumer material is basically a marketing concept to appeal to
a higher wage consumers.

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ac29
I was under the impression that the only thing really being recycled was
aluminium (and other metals, to some extent).

Typical plastic and paper waste is pretty dirty, due to misunderstanding of
what can be recycled - anywhere from just thinking anything vaguely paper or
plastic can be recycled to places where people apparently think recycling bins
are just different colored trash bins (or just dont care). Contamination of
otherwise recyclable materials by food is also an issue. Its also not worth
much since the feedstocks for new paper and plastic is pretty cheap.

Glass is also fairly worthless, since it needs to be sorted by color to
realistically be recycled. Mixed glass I believe is generally landfilled or
"up-cycled" into some sort of crushed aggregate for various purposes.

~~~
maxerickson
Lots of cardboard and paper is recycled in the US. It works fine.

It's also the case that any metal a scrapyard will pay you for is economical
to recycle. The majority of discarded steel is recycled.

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krinchan
Single stream recycling is the majority style of municipal recycling here in
the United States. It's popularity was along the lines of why we got Chip &
Sign and not Chip & PIN EMV: Governments consider their citizens too
uninformed and friction averse to sort their own recycling. They felt the
consequence of that would be that the municipal recycling would become an
underutilized money pit.

Unfortunately, those governments got the predictions right, but got the
consequences wrong. The cost of uninformed citizens putting plastic grocery
bags, gardening hoses, and all sorts of non-recyclable trash into the single
stream is extremely costly. Single stream plants shut down several times a day
to remove plastic film bags from their machinery, untangle hoses, and remove
literal tons of tainted recyclable material because someone threw a full paint
can in their recycling bin.

This is further exacerbated by many municipalities providing a recycling bin
that is larger than your yard waste and trash bin. A city I lived in
previously did this and many of my neighbors would just put their trash bags
into the recycling bin because their trash bin was full.

As such, single stream recycling has been on the ropes since before China
raised it's standards. Now it's in full on panic mode.

That said, I don't want to put up with a Japanese style rotation of trash
days, special trash bags, and 50 page manuals on how to sort your trash and
when to put it out either. Unfortunately, we're going to have to move away
from single stream if we want to increase recycling efficiency, it seems.

~~~
gowld
If a person dumps a paint can into their recycling, that person is not going
to clean and sort their waste into multi-stream recycling.

~~~
krinchan
True, but I posit the opportunity cost of them not recycling is less than the
current actual cost of tainted materials from single stream.

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akeck
Pursuing Zero Waste has turned out to be a fun hobby for me. I started because
I got tired of throwing things out all the time and then losing time to
dealing with the trash.

~~~
drdeadringer
I have a few questions [no particular order].

* How are you reducing your waste? Reducing input? Efficient internal usage? Efficient yet minimal output?

* What do you do with the waste you do still have [assuming any]? Re-purpose it, like a trash-to-treasure type deal?

* Do you consider your time dedicated to Zero Waste not "losing time to dealing with trash"?

~~~
akeck
I'm only playing around for now, Toyota-style. Also, our area lacks some
infrastructure that others take for granted (e.g., bulk product stores with
bring your own container) For example, we got a carbonater as an at-bat. This
eliminated 3-4 1L seltzer bottles per week, plus some cola 20 oz.s (via Cube
Cola). Will it be worth it? We'll see. But that's why it's a "fun hobby",
i.e., past-time status. Other things are on deck like composting as much as
possible. I'm already making bread regularly, but bread bags don't account for
much trash, so that's really a preference thing at this point. I'm also
experimenting with fast methods of making fruit spreads from frozen fruits. I
like PBJ sandwiches with jam, so I was tossing 1-2 jam jars a week. The
general idea is to learn truths about time/money costs and trade-offs via
rapid experiments. If things go well, we gel the stuff that works into weekly
workflows and enjoy less trash. We already reaped a minor victory. The trash
company had some... business issues, and didn't pick up for a month. What we
tossed still fit in the bin when they finally came back.

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lotsofpulp
The answer is reducing consumption.

~~~
genericone
Trader Joe's at least has made an effort to cut down on the use of plastic
packaging for their produce. So in this way, at least plastic consumption will
be reduced at the consumer level, even if only for Trader Joe's shoppers. I
always felt bad purchasing from them purely for the amount of packaging that
was involved.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90318155/heres-how-trader-
joes-p...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90318155/heres-how-trader-joes-plans-
to-cut-1m-pounds-of-single-use-plastic-from-its-stores)

~~~
ac29
Here's basically the entire article: they will "no longer offer single-use
plastic bags to customers, replace the plastic produce bags and Styrofoam
packages with compostable alternatives, and avoid using compounds like BPA in
packaging".

Trader Joes has always been semi-unique as a grocery store in that a
reasonably high percentage of their produce comes as a multipack on a
paper/stryofoam tray wrapped in plastic. It always struck me as wasteful as
well.

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southern_cross
Locally, a community recycling center is in the process of closing down. This
after having had its pickup and processing costs approach $100 a ton now.
Since the "tipping fee" at the local dump is only about a third of that, guess
where all of that formerly recyclable material is now headed? I expect that
our much larger municipal recycling program will soon be taking a similar
path.

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progfix
Good. Every country should deal with their waste on their own, otherwise no
one will ever do something to reduce it.

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forkLding
What are things software developers (which I presume most of HN is) can do to
make more recycling possible?

EDIT: It does seem, reading from this, that the packaging of goods have gone
too complex to be simply sorted by hand because the packaging itself can be
contaminated by the paint etc.

