The garbage disposal problem, of which recycling is a subset, is due to a lack of back pressure in the consumption system.
From the perspective of production, disposal is an externality. From the perspective of the consumer, disposal is an annoyance that they typically don't have enough buyer power individually to push back on to producers.
Society has come up one workaround: social conscience, the green movement, so that shame can be used to attack brands, aggregating buying power to push back on producers. It doesn't work brilliantly with everyone - some people are allergic to the ritualistic, moralizing pseudo-religious aspects of the movement.
Politics has come up with another: WEEE: the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This is an attempt to tax goods by incorporating the cost of disposal into the purchase price. While the green movement was necessary to provide political will, it's much better than a directly shaming approach - the closer the cost of disposal can be pushed to the producer, tightening the feedback loop, the more likely economic incentives will work.
Continuing to push the problem upstream into production is the long term answer. If you try and increase costs at point of disposal, consumers are simply incentivized to cheat, or pay people to cheat on their behalf. The whole exporting of rubbish to China wheeze was one big cheat. The costs have to be loaded at the point of purchase, and producers ultimately made responsible for costs of disposal.
And it's not just economic costs. It's "lifestyle", more or less. So a few decades ago, all beer bottles were the same size and shape. You took your empties back to the store, and got paid for them. Distributors bought them from stores, and manufacturers from distributors. So they got reused until they broke.
Maybe 40 years ago, some regional US beer makers still did this. Maybe some still do. I saw this 10-20 years ago in Mexico, for both beer and soda bottles. And it was also pretty common for wine bottles.
But now? Now my wife buys French yogurt in tiny glass bottles. Tiny heavy glass bottles. We could save them, but they're really too small for anything but liquor. And who wants to drink from old yogurt containers, in any case?
in the late 60s and 70s, a crucial aspect of the food coop movement was buying bulk stuff, and using your own containers. In Mexico, old-style milk stores often didn't provide containers. And if they did, it was plastic bags. Handling a 2L plastic bag of milk is quite the experience.
I can't imagine how the US could go back to bulk distribution and reusable containers. Or, for that matter, how we could undo suburbanization. But there are limits to externalities, and we are hitting them.
One interesting addendum is that many food producers are lobbying to argue that reducing the amount of plastic in their packages will likely lead to more food wastage.
The feedback loops here are fascinating, but I'm increasingly reminded of the scorched earth public relations tactics employed by the Tobacco industry against plain packaging and which turned out later to be pure fiction.
I find that Amazon is one of the worst offenders. It's clear, especially for Amazon fresh orders, that they have zero incentive to care about their plastic footprint, and they take full advantage of this. Should be taxed or disincentivized.
There is no garbage disposal problem -- disposal is easy and cheap.
Recycling is an attempt to address what people see as a product creation issue -- they object to the fact that resources are mined, smelted, drilled, refined, etc. in order to create new things, and see recycling as a way to ensure that less of that happens. "The same amount of plastic, but less drilling."
It's not pushed to the producer, it's pushed to the consumer, just as charging more for trash does (which may be ideal depending on who you ask). Regardless, all this does is keeps those who have less from obtaining more, others will eat the costs. Seems everything that is disliked these days always has government taking money as the suggested solution. Even if it was the only way, plenty is already taken to rationally use it to help without using the tool punitively.
If we can somehow figure out how to better sort recycling, some U.S. markets for plastics and paper may emerge.
The technology exists and is in production. Here's a new 90 ton per hour recycling plant, from Bulk Handling Systems, in California.[1] This is a good video to watch to see the whole process. Some of the separation is done with the usual air separators, vibrators, and screens. Optical sorters controlling air jets do some of the separation. This plant has no manual pickers; it uses AI vision controlled robots for the hard separation stations. This is not a prototype; it's a big production plant.
Separating different plastics can be done with near infrared multispectral imaging. Here's a TOMRA sorter doing that in a real plant.[2] That's from 2015.
Finally, here's a big plant in LA which takes in plastic bottles and puts out clean plastic pellets ready for injection molding into new bottles.[3]
China is still accepting US plastics for recycling. It just has to be sorted down to 0.5% contamination, and that's being checked. The standard used to be 1.5%, it wasn't really enforced, and 5% contamination was not uncommon. US recyclers have to upgrade their facilities to the point that there's no manual picking required on the output.
Big cities are dealing with this. Smaller communities have problems, because they don't have enough volume for the newer equipment and don't generate enough material to find buyers.
It's important to understand the issue that recycling is meant to address. It's cost of landfills, not shortage of materials.
The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering.
So, I can see two solutions:
(1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order.
(2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.
"Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order."
Yeah, it's not invented in America, so it obviously doesn't exist.
Listen, there are countries with almost no landfills because everything is incinerated. Heck, there are even US states without landfills because everything is incinerated! This is not a "tall order", trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.
So basically the argument I had with my dad (conservative blue collar) a couple years ago when he argued "No we're not going to pay $2/mo for recycling bins, this whole recycling thing is just a scam for the trash companies to skim money." Me: "Blah blah blah rainforests, blah blah blah manufacturing waste to produce, etc." I guess he was right?
(1) I think waste-to-energy is underappreciated, especially if a certain elasticity is planned rather than just running the turbines 24/7 it can meet the elasticity needs of the electric grid.
So does this mean that recycling is not necessarily even a net gain for the environment? It's all just because it is (was) cheaper?
I mean, if it's really not having an impact on e.g. rainforests etc, and adds the environmental toll of all the petroleum used to ship it all back overseas and the recycling process, might it even be a net loss for the environment?
Landfills are actually pretty cheap, which I think is part of the problem. If I take debris directly to my local transfer station (Portland, OR) they charge a mere $30/ton.
> Even in San Francisco, Reed kept pointing out items that aren’t easily recyclable but that keep showing up at the Recology plant: soy-sauce packets and pizza boxes
This is funny, because I was just at SFO yesterday where I got Sushi while waiting for my flight, and was confused by the lack of garbage receptacle. There was a "cans/bottles" recycling bin and a compost bin. A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.) So there's a fair amount of institutional negligence going on.
In Japan they collect different types of trash on different days at firmly set times at dedicated spots; if you miss the day/time or aren't quick enough to get to the spot prior to collection, you have to keep that trash for another week. It was quite an experience when I lived in Kyoto (near Tō-ji temple) to observe/take part in this process.
> A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.)
To be fair to the sign, I'm betting you weren't charged for the soy packets. You didn't even receive ownership of the tray.
Sometimes I wonder if the large institutions with just recycle + compost bins know that all your waste just ends up in the trash anyway, and they're just labeling the trash bins as "recycle" and "compost" to make eco-conscious consumers feel better.
No one cares because the perceived cost is zero. Burning your recycling just externalizes the cost to the environment. If I lived in one of those cities, I’d encourage the city to increase disposal fees so they can do it properly. If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners. If business can earn more profit or increase volume by using better packaging, then they’ll do so.
Why should consumers pay those fees or taxes? Businesses ultimately cause the problem by producing disposable goods, and should bear the cost of disposing their goods, not consumers. Charge manufacturers per-product based on how much of a cost/environmental impact it is to dispose of that product (and packaging!). Something like a 1¢/gram of plastic produced, charged to manufacturers, could make it more painful to produce wasteful products like bottled water and Keurig cups.
So basically, recycling is a lie. Most stuff can’t really be recycled except at great cost. Who perpetuated this lie to begin with I wonder, was it just to get us to keep buying stuff?
If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already. We can see how people discarded things even when they were relatively expensive. Example all the different strata at the Troy/Troja site.
It’s hardly a modern problem. But in modern times we have added complications of sheer volume, toxicity, and lack of biodegradability.
>If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already
Disposal is a problem since the dawn of time in the general since (you need to dispose waste somewhere, even if you're an amoeba), but it's misleading to call it a problem anywhere close to today's sense back 3000 years ago.
It wasn't even close in neither quantity, nor quality.
Hunter gathers made large waste piles a 100,000 years ago. They are called shell midens and other things. We only see a fraction of these because sea level was much lower then.
Maybe this is a blessing in disguise so we're focused more on recycling from the start, not as an after-the-fact. Companies like Apple (and others) have been inching us towards this notion of disposable electronics. Once we can no longer simply "dispose" of things, perhaps it will push companies and governments to look at making things more environmentally responsible from the start.
I've always thought recycling is a bit of a sham, designed primarily to provide some feel-good busywork for people who are concerned about environmental impact of using bad packaging, but not enough to change their habits.
Not at all. Recycling glass and metal can be virtually perpetual, and applies to far more than just packaging. Recycling paper and plastic is obviously much more limited, and there should be funds derived from disposal fees that are used to research better, longer cycled alternatives (as well as improvements to existing recycling tech). But a 4-6x reduction in paper/plastic waste through recycling is extremely significant nonetheless.
Of course lifestyle change is an important part of any solution, but certainly not a panacea or even a desired exclusive remedy.
I agree up until the last part. Habits aren't formed in a vacuum. Corporations sell products in bad packaging and for most people most of the time there is no reasonable way to avoid purchasing products in that form. The only way to change the situation is to legislate. A tax on packaging seems most pragmatic. Unfortunately, pragmatism would go against the prevailing dogmatic faith in the free market being the solution to all problems and so we do nothing.
The answer is to put the burden of recycling back on the manufacturer, and add a refundable cost to packaging on purchase.
Businesses have zero incentive make products easy to recycle.
If I recall, the only recycling success stories involve aluminum, glass, and perhaps paper. These are relatively easy to recycle, yet even these required financial incentives.
>Plastic clamshell containers are difficult to recycle because the material they’re made of is so flimsy—but it’s hard to find berries not sold in those containers, even at most farmers’ markets.
Yes, but it's easy to find farmers grateful to take them back for reuse. Same with those green plastic open baskets. Plastic produce bags can be brought back in a shopping bag for reuse by ourselves.
Whenever we're talking about mass transit, or communications, or trains, or pretty much any other piece of infrastructure, there are always lots of people saying that America can't do things like Europe does because it's huge, everything is dispersed, there are enormous low-density stretches, etc.
Where are all those people when the subject turns to garbage infrastructure? If you have so much empty space, take some of it and make a huge landfill! Put it in a desert or something. Make some hills out of garbage.
There's precedent, too. When the US government needed to test nuclear weapons, they got a big honking piece of desert and nuked it. When they needed an area with very low RF interference for some spy stuff, they found some low-density place and banned radios there. When they need to test artillery, desert again.
I'd bet one of the most immediate consequences is a lot less plastic winds up in the oceans. We know just a few rivers and cities account for nearly all ocean plastic, and I'd assume several of these are major routes for imported plastics.
To solve the problem: stop making the packaging/garbage.
It's not solved by working out what to do with all the packaging/garbage, it's solved by stopping making it.
"Recycling" is the distraction/sleight of hand that the packaging industry uses to make you feel OK with the infinite spew of garbage it creates. Finally China has shown the lie of recycling.
In your kitchen, if the water tap is gushing water onto the floor, you don't spend all your time focusing on how to mop up the water, you turn off the tap. Same thing.
I guess this might be an unpopular opinion, but I've never seen hard numbers proving that recycling is actually necessary. I am curious, what would be the consequences of simply digging big holes and burying all our rubbish? I understand that some of it generates greenhouse gasses, so that might have to be dealt with separately. But for general inert waste, is it that bad to just stick it in the ground?
In 1990, A. Clark Wiseman from Gonzaga calculated that if we dug a landfill 100 yards deep and put in all trash generated in the US for the next millennium, it would fit in a square area of land 35 miles on each side (assuming of course levels of consumption and disposal from the time). By point of comparison, replacing all existing energy sources with solar and wind power would require orders of magnitude more acreage. I'm not sure if most New Yorkers have ever seen a place like e.g. Nevada, but I'm not exactly worried about the amount of land needed for landfills.
New technologies allow landfill operators to extract some of the waste and use it for industrial purposes (particularly methane, with potent greenhouse emissions, albeit relatively short-lived). It also remains true that some forms of recycling - paper, cardboard and metals like aluminum or steel - are still cost effective, provided that the public stops trying to recycle their pizza boxes. I've often wondered if environmental policy would be better served by focusing on sorting high-quality, cost-effective recyclables into recycling plants and putting everything else into the landfill.
IMO, recycling has ceased being about - or perhaps never was about - economic efficiency or ecological health, and is mostly a cheap way for people to feel like they're doing the right thing. I have become somewhat skeptical about recycling, and even I feel the shame of being a heretic against pathos-laden gospel first preached in grade school for failing to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin.
Perhaps, in the near long term, this is good news? Now wasteful America can't avoid the results of its ways? Up til now, it's been out of sight, out of mind. Sure, recycling plastic feels good. But less plastic - a petroleum byproduct - period would be noticeably better.
Perhaps, once the price of disposal goes up (and landfills are NIMBY) then root problem will finally be addressed? Perhaps, there is finally hope?
The whole point was that we were supposed to be recycling, not using more fossil fuels to ship it all back overseas to be possibly just burned or buried anyways. And at best the recycled material is shipped yet again overseas back to us in the form of new products. The best thing that's come from all this is that we finally know what actually happens to all that 'recycled' material.
There are endless 'convenience' obscenities built into the consumer interface that could easily be eliminated through legislation. Many 'solutions' were invented up to a century ago, then discarded over the years (for convience/profit).
Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce.
Milk bottles ... soda bottles ...
Example: Grocery stores used to pack groceries into boxes products were shipped in. 'Want plastic or paper?' NEITHER. Consumer may choose to bring in/rent re-useable crates.
And so on. There are -endless- working solutions that will eliminate the massive costs of creating all of this waste and of disposing of it. WE have let this happen, and WE deserved the consequences.
California could raise a tax, let’s call it a “CRV” tax for container redemption value, and then use it to subsidize curbside pickup of pre-sorted recycling.
Seriously though, at the current 5-20 cents per container crv tax, how can recycling in California not be profitable for the state?
much of it goes to individuals who collect and sort the materials and bring them to recycling centers for a cash reward.
a lot of times, these individuals collect the materials from big blue bins consumers have carefully filled and placed at the curbside near their residences.
another place the money goes is to people in Arizona who gather plastics in that state and truck it across the border to cash in on California's generous recycling rewards program.
[+] [-] barrkel|7 years ago|reply
From the perspective of production, disposal is an externality. From the perspective of the consumer, disposal is an annoyance that they typically don't have enough buyer power individually to push back on to producers.
Society has come up one workaround: social conscience, the green movement, so that shame can be used to attack brands, aggregating buying power to push back on producers. It doesn't work brilliantly with everyone - some people are allergic to the ritualistic, moralizing pseudo-religious aspects of the movement.
Politics has come up with another: WEEE: the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This is an attempt to tax goods by incorporating the cost of disposal into the purchase price. While the green movement was necessary to provide political will, it's much better than a directly shaming approach - the closer the cost of disposal can be pushed to the producer, tightening the feedback loop, the more likely economic incentives will work.
Continuing to push the problem upstream into production is the long term answer. If you try and increase costs at point of disposal, consumers are simply incentivized to cheat, or pay people to cheat on their behalf. The whole exporting of rubbish to China wheeze was one big cheat. The costs have to be loaded at the point of purchase, and producers ultimately made responsible for costs of disposal.
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
And it's not just economic costs. It's "lifestyle", more or less. So a few decades ago, all beer bottles were the same size and shape. You took your empties back to the store, and got paid for them. Distributors bought them from stores, and manufacturers from distributors. So they got reused until they broke.
Maybe 40 years ago, some regional US beer makers still did this. Maybe some still do. I saw this 10-20 years ago in Mexico, for both beer and soda bottles. And it was also pretty common for wine bottles.
But now? Now my wife buys French yogurt in tiny glass bottles. Tiny heavy glass bottles. We could save them, but they're really too small for anything but liquor. And who wants to drink from old yogurt containers, in any case?
in the late 60s and 70s, a crucial aspect of the food coop movement was buying bulk stuff, and using your own containers. In Mexico, old-style milk stores often didn't provide containers. And if they did, it was plastic bags. Handling a 2L plastic bag of milk is quite the experience.
I can't imagine how the US could go back to bulk distribution and reusable containers. Or, for that matter, how we could undo suburbanization. But there are limits to externalities, and we are hitting them.
[+] [-] caoilte|7 years ago|reply
One interesting addendum is that many food producers are lobbying to argue that reducing the amount of plastic in their packages will likely lead to more food wastage.
The feedback loops here are fascinating, but I'm increasingly reminded of the scorched earth public relations tactics employed by the Tobacco industry against plain packaging and which turned out later to be pure fiction.
https://www.bath.ac.uk/case-studies/debunking-big-tobaccos-a...
[+] [-] Areading314|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|7 years ago|reply
Recycling is an attempt to address what people see as a product creation issue -- they object to the fact that resources are mined, smelted, drilled, refined, etc. in order to create new things, and see recycling as a way to ensure that less of that happens. "The same amount of plastic, but less drilling."
[+] [-] kodablah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
The technology exists and is in production. Here's a new 90 ton per hour recycling plant, from Bulk Handling Systems, in California.[1] This is a good video to watch to see the whole process. Some of the separation is done with the usual air separators, vibrators, and screens. Optical sorters controlling air jets do some of the separation. This plant has no manual pickers; it uses AI vision controlled robots for the hard separation stations. This is not a prototype; it's a big production plant.
Separating different plastics can be done with near infrared multispectral imaging. Here's a TOMRA sorter doing that in a real plant.[2] That's from 2015.
Finally, here's a big plant in LA which takes in plastic bottles and puts out clean plastic pellets ready for injection molding into new bottles.[3]
China is still accepting US plastics for recycling. It just has to be sorted down to 0.5% contamination, and that's being checked. The standard used to be 1.5%, it wasn't really enforced, and 5% contamination was not uncommon. US recyclers have to upgrade their facilities to the point that there's no manual picking required on the output.
Big cities are dealing with this. Smaller communities have problems, because they don't have enough volume for the newer equipment and don't generate enough material to find buyers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=254&v=4FpsH_ETT7... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0OZ7Mlmkvk [3] https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside... [4] https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-standard-...
[+] [-] pfdietz|7 years ago|reply
The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering.
So, I can see two solutions:
(1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order.
(2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|7 years ago|reply
Yeah, it's not invented in America, so it obviously doesn't exist.
Listen, there are countries with almost no landfills because everything is incinerated. Heck, there are even US states without landfills because everything is incinerated! This is not a "tall order", trash incineration is a solved problem, modern trash incineration plants are very efficient at reclaiming energy into either heat or electricity.
[+] [-] daxfohl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
But then you have to process the ash: https://www.thisiseco.co.uk/news_and_blog/what-happens-to-wa...
(2) is roughly the Green Dot or WEEE approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
[+] [-] daxfohl|7 years ago|reply
I mean, if it's really not having an impact on e.g. rainforests etc, and adds the environmental toll of all the petroleum used to ship it all back overseas and the recycling process, might it even be a net loss for the environment?
[+] [-] skept|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bickfordb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeschlather|7 years ago|reply
This is funny, because I was just at SFO yesterday where I got Sushi while waiting for my flight, and was confused by the lack of garbage receptacle. There was a "cans/bottles" recycling bin and a compost bin. A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.) So there's a fair amount of institutional negligence going on.
[+] [-] shaftoe|7 years ago|reply
It's likely everything goes to the same place anyway (and the bins are a lie) or there's a separation process that will handle it for you.
Before you downvote me: am I wrong? What else should a consumer in this situation reasonably do?
[+] [-] bitL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|7 years ago|reply
To be fair to the sign, I'm betting you weren't charged for the soy packets. You didn't even receive ownership of the tray.
[+] [-] lsllc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mostlyjason|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoorishBears|7 years ago|reply
That just punishes the low income people again.
Taxes on goods disproportionately affect poor people because the tax is a larger portion of your purchasing power the lower your income is.
A rich person, or even a middle class person, isn’t going to be put out of their habits by a couple of cents.
[+] [-] ryandrake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
It’s hardly a modern problem. But in modern times we have added complications of sheer volume, toxicity, and lack of biodegradability.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Disposal is a problem since the dawn of time in the general since (you need to dispose waste somewhere, even if you're an amoeba), but it's misleading to call it a problem anywhere close to today's sense back 3000 years ago.
It wasn't even close in neither quantity, nor quality.
[+] [-] peter303|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simulacra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
Without that it is very difficult to claim, with any credibility at all, being environmentally responsible.
I'm not optimistic.
[+] [-] pertymcpert|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|7 years ago|reply
1 - https://www.plasticchina.org/
[+] [-] forgotmypw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgc|7 years ago|reply
Of course lifestyle change is an important part of any solution, but certainly not a panacea or even a desired exclusive remedy.
[+] [-] caoilte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobodyandproud|7 years ago|reply
Businesses have zero incentive make products easy to recycle.
If I recall, the only recycling success stories involve aluminum, glass, and perhaps paper. These are relatively easy to recycle, yet even these required financial incentives.
[+] [-] everybodyknows|7 years ago|reply
Yes, but it's easy to find farmers grateful to take them back for reuse. Same with those green plastic open baskets. Plastic produce bags can be brought back in a shopping bag for reuse by ourselves.
+1 for farmer's markets.
[+] [-] Camillo|7 years ago|reply
Where are all those people when the subject turns to garbage infrastructure? If you have so much empty space, take some of it and make a huge landfill! Put it in a desert or something. Make some hills out of garbage.
There's precedent, too. When the US government needed to test nuclear weapons, they got a big honking piece of desert and nuked it. When they needed an area with very low RF interference for some spy stuff, they found some low-density place and banned radios there. When they need to test artillery, desert again.
[+] [-] merpnderp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|7 years ago|reply
It's not solved by working out what to do with all the packaging/garbage, it's solved by stopping making it.
"Recycling" is the distraction/sleight of hand that the packaging industry uses to make you feel OK with the infinite spew of garbage it creates. Finally China has shown the lie of recycling.
In your kitchen, if the water tap is gushing water onto the floor, you don't spend all your time focusing on how to mop up the water, you turn off the tap. Same thing.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unstrafed|7 years ago|reply
New technologies allow landfill operators to extract some of the waste and use it for industrial purposes (particularly methane, with potent greenhouse emissions, albeit relatively short-lived). It also remains true that some forms of recycling - paper, cardboard and metals like aluminum or steel - are still cost effective, provided that the public stops trying to recycle their pizza boxes. I've often wondered if environmental policy would be better served by focusing on sorting high-quality, cost-effective recyclables into recycling plants and putting everything else into the landfill.
IMO, recycling has ceased being about - or perhaps never was about - economic efficiency or ecological health, and is mostly a cheap way for people to feel like they're doing the right thing. I have become somewhat skeptical about recycling, and even I feel the shame of being a heretic against pathos-laden gospel first preached in grade school for failing to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|7 years ago|reply
Perhaps, once the price of disposal goes up (and landfills are NIMBY) then root problem will finally be addressed? Perhaps, there is finally hope?
[+] [-] thekingofh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|7 years ago|reply
Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce.
Milk bottles ... soda bottles ...
Example: Grocery stores used to pack groceries into boxes products were shipped in. 'Want plastic or paper?' NEITHER. Consumer may choose to bring in/rent re-useable crates.
And so on. There are -endless- working solutions that will eliminate the massive costs of creating all of this waste and of disposing of it. WE have let this happen, and WE deserved the consequences.
[+] [-] hedora|7 years ago|reply
Seriously though, at the current 5-20 cents per container crv tax, how can recycling in California not be profitable for the state?
Where is that money going?!?
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|7 years ago|reply
a lot of times, these individuals collect the materials from big blue bins consumers have carefully filled and placed at the curbside near their residences.
another place the money goes is to people in Arizona who gather plastics in that state and truck it across the border to cash in on California's generous recycling rewards program.