US Recycling Companies Face Upheaval From China Scrap Ban (wsj.com) 183
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: U.S. companies that collect waste for recycling are weighing higher prices and other changes to their operations since China upended the industry when it stopped accepting much of the scrap material Americans have been shipping there for decades. The top two solid waste services companies in the U.S., Waste Management Inc. and Republic Services Inc., both recently pulled back profit projections in their recycling divisions based on China's new policies, which have created a glut in scrap markets and sent global prices for scrap material plummeting.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., 31% of U.S. scrap commodity exports worth a total of $5.6 billion were sent to China last year. It was cheap for recycling collectors to send scrap to China because ocean carriers offered deeply discounted prices to get shipping containers back to Asia after they had arrived at U.S. ports packed with goods made in Chinese factories. "We were happy to send material back in them for pennies on the dollar," Mr. Coupland said. Now it's gotten more complicated. Mr. Coupland said Republic Services has found new buyers in Malaysia, India and other markets, but fewer ships make direct trips there from the U.S., driving up transportation costs. Global prices for used materials have plummeted, so Republic loses money on most of the recycled scrap it now sells overseas. That cost is increasingly likely to get passed along to U.S. households and businesses.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., 31% of U.S. scrap commodity exports worth a total of $5.6 billion were sent to China last year. It was cheap for recycling collectors to send scrap to China because ocean carriers offered deeply discounted prices to get shipping containers back to Asia after they had arrived at U.S. ports packed with goods made in Chinese factories. "We were happy to send material back in them for pennies on the dollar," Mr. Coupland said. Now it's gotten more complicated. Mr. Coupland said Republic Services has found new buyers in Malaysia, India and other markets, but fewer ships make direct trips there from the U.S., driving up transportation costs. Global prices for used materials have plummeted, so Republic loses money on most of the recycled scrap it now sells overseas. That cost is increasingly likely to get passed along to U.S. households and businesses.
Recycle (Score:2, Insightful)
Recycle = sending to a dump overseas
But at least it feels good to save the environment!
Re: Recycle (Score:2)
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If you had read the /. summary, you would know: because the ships are going there anyway. Filling them with stuff does slightly increase the amount of fuel they burn, but probably not all that much.
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China did it at a significant cost, cost they will cover in a form of subsidies to prop their own raw resource extraction companies.
Best Buy is still taking many types of e-waste (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how much longer they are going to keep it up, but I just took in a UPS tonight for recycling and mentioned that I had removed the battery, thinking I would have to take it to a Batteries Plus or something. Nope, the customer service rep said they take all kinds of batteries, any that are rechargeable.
I personally very much appreciate the chance to recycle virtually anything electronic there at no charge whatsoever.
I know they will no longer take monitors or TVs for free, but I don't know of anywhere that does.
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That doesn't make much difference - it still has to go somewhere.
I am no fan of the tree-huggers, but we really should be taking care of our own refuse.
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The problem is we're not really recycling much. We're mostly generating waste, using up resources and land, destroying entire ecosystems in the process.
There's a reason we're currently in one of the fastest and largest extinction event that we know of: That reason is Us.
But people just refuse to understand geometric growth. it all looks great until that last and final step..
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Trump derangement syndrome in action. A completely unrelated topic, and a sufferer just *has* to jump in and change the topic to Trump.
"Government" is warranted because they're they only people with the power to make a real difference.
The Trump government has shown that it doesn't give a toss about the the environment or the future so I guess that's relevant, too.
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the fees for the 'non free' stuff isn't much. cheaper than your regular trash hauler, probably.
when you drop off your three items.. buy something.. anything. a movie, a pack of sd cards.. something to say 'thanks'. they may suck at retail, but they are doing a tremendous public service.. so show some appreciation. they no-doubt track people who drop off to see if they hit the registers, or even enter the retail floor, or not. if they see foot traffic and sales as a result of the program, they're more apt to
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You could have a law that says that any company that sells them must take them back for recycling.
Crazy talk, I know. And if they did pass a law like that it would lead to compulsory gay marriage and socialised medicine with death camps. And Sharia law. Probably overnight.
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Agreed (your first para), although I'm not sure what you meant by "them"; I suppose it's electronics. And it would be nice if the China problem would lead to a recycling solution.
I do a lot of buying from Amazon, and I'm bothered by how much packing stuff I'm recycling. Amazon is good about avoiding styrofoam (they mostly use those bags that get pumped full of air, and which contain very little plastic by weight). The original manufacturers, though, often use styrofoam, perhaps because the bags lose air
California (Score:4, Informative)
Gotta love California. There is a service called Ynotrecycle, that will come to your address and pick up monitors for free.
http://www.ynotrecycle.com/ [ynotrecycle.com]
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In California we pay a fee when we buy electronics, in exchange for which we get to get rid of electronics for free. I take mine to the local waste transfer station. This has really opened up viability of buying crappy old electronics for a couple bucks and seeing if they are good, repairable, etc. If the answer is no, I don't have to pay to get rid of them.
Let's hope California can figure out some place for all that stuff to go at the current cost level, or it'll have to increase those fees.
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Commenting to remove moderation. Meant to mod this insightful, accidentally clicked redundant.
This is a good point that people often miss. When you implement a policy like the one described, it may make some thing more expensive, but it may also make some other things possible that were not before.
Its not free, idiot.. (Score:2)
You have just already paid for it..
How do so many people have the mental disconnect that allows them to think things are 'free' when really the cost is just being spread, and often hugely inefficiently?
Tell me, how is the 'free' education in California going these days..
and your state jacka$$ ? (Score:2)
Well enough that the economy in California is booming. I don't see that the cost of education in California is substantially better or worse than any other state in the US. While the cost of education in the US in general is out of sight crazy granted. How is the cost of 'free' education in '(insert your state)' ?
https://www.politifact.com/cal... [politifact.com]
Good news! (Score:2, Insightful)
If we're not reusing the materials ourselves, it's not real recycling.
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If we're not reusing the materials ourselves
Who is "ourselves"? Humans? Or the Americans who were simply returning raw materials to China for manufacturing of new Chinese shit that is bought by Americans?
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We have never had assurance that the material we send to China is actually being recycled. The controversy is over how much of it may just be dumped.
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Indeed, but that is an entirely different point than the one being made.
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Well, they are (were) paying billions for it, so I am pretty sure it wasnt just to put it at their own expense in to landfills.....
What they have done also, is not to STOP it, bt to only allow waste that is actually correctly sorted and classified.
Its hilarious (and dissapointing) to see the 'we are professional recyclers' all trying to spin that as 'we are blocked!' - just do your fecking job properly, instead of skimming huge profits as a middleman.
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If we're not reusing the materials ourselves, it's not real recycling.
Why is it important to recycle self-sufficiently at the national level, but not at the state or county level? Should, say, Delaware have facilities for recycling every possible product, since it isn't "real" if they send polypropylene bottles to New Jersey? What about Lichtenstein?
Re:Good news! (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.liechtenstein.li/e... [liechtenstein.li]
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Funny you should mention that country.
Ever been there? I have.
It is a 'country' in the same way several other tiny tax haven fiefdoms are..
They have no poor, no production (unless its fashionable to do so), and they pretty much exist as a playground to the rich, supported on the service industry for those same people.
Their population is so low, and so service biased, that they have in effect no industry to support, or general workers to worry about.
Lovely country to visit though, so long as you have plenty
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There's nothing inherently wrong with centralized recycling. It's a matter of economy of scale weighed against transportation cost and impact. But if 'central' means a place where you have no idea what recycling standard, if any, is being applied, that's when you need to stay one step more local.
Good. (Score:1)
Stop building garbage islands in the ocean. Deal with it properly.
About fucking time (Score:1)
Now recycling companies will have to ACTUALLY RECYCLE. What a novel fucking concept. The amount of waste produced by our society is simply unacceptable and unsustainable at the rate we are going. If we are going to continue on the path of planned obsolescence, at the very least we need to maximize the recovery of valuable materials from the things we throw away. Our mines aren't going to last forever, and the minerals we have access to are finite.
Mark my words, in another 50-100 years, we're going to ha
opportunity for 3d printing technology (Score:2)
what if you could just feed aluminum cans and plastic bottles to your 3d printer and it could just recycle them directly into whatever you wanted?
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what if you could just feed aluminum cans and plastic bottles to your 3d printer and it could just recycle them directly into whatever you wanted?
The problem isn't the actual recycling. The problem is that China accepts scrap with high levels of contaminants while nobody else does. Why? Well they were really just putting this stuff in the ground, burning it or dumping it in the ocean.
Now that the gravy train is over, they need to do is make the recycling biz honest.
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The problem isn't the actual recycling. The problem is that China accepts scrap with high levels of contaminants while nobody else does. Why? Well they were really just putting this stuff in the ground, burning it or dumping it in the ocean.
Well, no. I don't understand why everyone assumes that just because recycling was being shipped overseas then it must have been just dumped in a landfill or in the sea. The Chinese are too stupid to recycle, or what?
Yes, there was certainly some dumping going and some shady "recycling" companies in China were not really recycling everything. This however, was not the whole industry. The main reason China was accepting scrap with high levels of contaminants was that labour in China was cheap enough to have p
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I don't understand why everyone assumes that just because recycling was being shipped overseas then it must have been just dumped in a landfill or in the sea.
...
Yes, there was certainly some dumping going and some shady "recycling" companies in China were not really recycling everything.
...
Yes, the contaminants (and the scrap that had become too contaminated to use) was in the end getting dumped or burned
And now you know why.
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Wait... (Score:3)
...so you're saying we CAN'T just dump our shit in China and let them deal with it?
That's so...unAmerican.
unfair trade (Score:2)
Unfair trade? Fine, take back your trash.
The problem with paper contamination (Score:2, Informative)
If my ignorant neighbors would quit throwing their used paper towels and greasy pizza box bottoms into the recycling bin, maybe the US could manage to achieve China's more stringent contamination rate requirements for paper recyclables.
Not to mention people's habit of leaving liquid inside their drinking bottles and reinstalling the caps when throwing them into the recycle bin. C'mon guys, knock that stupid ignorant shit off.
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Not to mention people's habit of leaving liquid inside their drinking bottles and reinstalling the caps when throwing them into the recycle bin. C'mon guys, knock that stupid ignorant shit off.
How about we just ban plastic bottles? Then figure out what do with the ones we have (how to recycle them / burn them, or whatever).
What exactly can a plastic bottle do that a glass bottle, or metal can, or some sort of paper/cardboard container cannot? I mean other than contaminate oceans for centuries. Drinks from metal and glass containers taste better than drinks from plastic ones. They are less contaminated. The only benefit is that plastic is cheap and light, so producers get to save some money and in
Re: The problem with paper contamination (Score:4, Insightful)
Making plastic is significantly less energy and thus CO2 intensive than glass, paper or metal, especially when recycled. Usually if it's cheap, it's also good for the environment. The only reason to ban plastic would be because consumers behave like idiots.
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Add to that it is lighter than glass, which means it needs less energy/fuel to transport it.
I really do like the aluminum bottles, and they make sense when made from 100% recycled aluminum. They're even cheaper than plastic bottles in terms of energy needed to produce them.
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Making plastic is significantly less energy and thus CO2 intensive than glass, paper or metal, especially when recycled.
Energy intensive != CO2 intensive, especially in a world where we are moving away from fossil fuels more and more for electricity generation. Not to mention that it's standard practice to put aluminum smelters or paper mills close to cheap sources of electricity - which usually means hydropower or a nuclear plant. On the other hand, plastic is made from fossil fuels (apart from a very small percentage of the total which are bioplastics).
Plastic is also terrible for recycling compared to glass and metal. Unl
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Survive a fall onto a hard surface without breaking/deforming.
Plastic bottles can also deform after a fall, not to the same extent as metal of course. I also don't get what the problem with deformation is, as long as it doesn't break (who cares if a metal can has a dint in it?).
While a plastic bottle will not break after falling onto a hard surface, it will often open and spill its contents. It happened to me tons of times. Most recently, I lost half a jar of honey this way...
Allow dispensing of contents without a utensil (e.g., condiments or shampoo).
Granted. However, I was not really thinking of shampoo when talking about plastic bottles (I
Good (Score:3)
Save the oceans - stop recycling plastic (Score:3)
Much of the plastic collected for recycling in europe ends up to shady places in china and other less developed countries. In which the process of handling the waste is less than perfect.
http://www.thegwpf.org/new-rep... [thegwpf.org]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk]
"It is feared that an increasing proportion of waste set aside for recycling is now being thrown into the sea."
I doubt the operators receiveing the waste make much difference with European waste and American waste. That is to say, most likely both will end to the environment. Shipping trash for recycling to some 3rd world country is a fraud. They may have cheap labor there, but I doubt they have the high tech and proper processes to handle everything cleanly and enviromental friendly way.
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They may have cheap labor there, but I doubt they have the high tech and proper processes to handle everything cleanly and enviromental friendly way.
You don't need high tech to separate garbage. Do you use some sort of high tech when you separate garbage into recyclables, organics, and non-recyclables at home? No, just your hands (and your eyes and brain, of course). It's boring, annoying, dirty manual work. The type poor people in third-world countries will do.
You are right of course that the way the waste is handled is bad. Let's say you ship a container containing 80% recyclables and 20% contaminants to a poor Asian country...the 80% recyclables will
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Hurry up and Brexit, and don't use the word Europe to describe a single country's shitty policies.
Much of the plastic in Europe doesn't leave Europe. Many European countries have excellent plastic recycling systems in place and actively import plastic from neighbours.
When you have lemons... (Score:5, Interesting)
Create a new industry there, which will only benefit them and reduce the reason for leaving. It also gives a better place for us to send our recycling materials.
Just a thought.
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NAFTA has enabled American farmers to dump cheap ag products there, totally destroying what ag economy they had.
1. How does NAFTA, which is an agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, change how US agriculture producers can sell in Guatemala?
2. How are US farmers, who have a much higher labor cost plus higher shipping costs, able to compete with the cheap Guatemalan labor available to local farmers?
There certainly has been an uptick in Guatemalan immigration to the US coinciding with the rise of the drug trade and accompanying violence, but I haven't previously seen anything that attributes the rise to NAFTA. Pe
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The economy in Guatemala is a wreck, and the drug trade has the country a complete mess. That's why we're seeing so many trying to make their way into the USA. Condemming illegal immigrants to death through deportation isn't an effective answer.
With this notion of creating a recycling industry in Guatemala, you kill two birds with one stone.
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I'm no Ag expert, in fact I know very little. But I've spent time in remote areas of southern Mexico, and semi-jungle areas of Ecuador and Colombia. And the kinds of crops that grow well there are often quite different from the crops that grow here. Fruit, yucca, black beans, coffee; I've never seen anyone try to grow wheat, soy etc. there. The only crop I know of that grows well in both places is corn. So I'm not sure how much competition there can be between Guatemalan farmers and American farmers.
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2. See 1. and economies of scale.
Not even American farmers with the same subsidies can compete with agribusinesses who share their workers and farm implements across a vast land area and take advantage of corporate loopholes.
Workers who are cheaper than in China? (Score:2)
The actual issue (Score:4, Informative)
The actual problem here is that plastic is almost impossible to recycle when it's not properly cleaned and separated. Which is only really possible to to at the point of origin. Essentially the person taking out his plastic trash will have to properly separate it and wash it.
Which is why countries where this is done, such as my native Finland exported almost none of their plastic to be recycled to China, and what we did, we still can export. Because people around here will literally wash their plastic garbage before taking it to the recycling bin. I mean literally wash it with water until it's reasonably clean. Which means that all that recycler has to do is to do a cursory check and then just fabricate it into pellets and it's good for reuse.
Which incidentally is what Chinese still gladly take.
What they will no longer take is general dirty plastic that is all but impossible to recycle without massive manpower investment.
There will need to be a massive cultural shift to actually get people in countries that used to export dirty plastic as "recyclable" to actually sort and wash their own plastic waste so it is actually recyclable at a reasonable cost. Before that, so called "recycling companies" that used to take dirty unsorted plastic and pretend to recycle it will have to go bust because their business model no longer works. And that is unlikely to be in near future, as there are plenty of poor Asian and African states that still have manpower that is exceedingly cheap to dig through landfill full of plastic, separate it, clean it and take it to a dealer.
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There will need to be a massive cultural shift to actually get people in countries that used to export dirty plastic as "recyclable" to actually sort and wash their own plastic waste so it is actually recyclable at a reasonable cost.
It would be easier to just ban 90-95% of plastic packaging. Which I think will happen in the end. We used to live in a world without plastic packaging, when consumer goods were packaged in materials that were less damaging to the environment - glass, paper and metal. You could make the case that plastic is essential in some small number (5-10%) of today's use cases. It's not essential to have water or Coca Cola in a plastic bottle, nor to have your tomatoes pre-wrapped in plastic foil, nor to have butter in
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It will not happen, because overwhelming majority of plastic packaging that ends up in oceans is from 10 great rivers. 8 of which are in Asia and 2 are in Africa.
Both regions have two common things. Poor populace and high temperatures. Former means that people buy their food and their personal hygiene items in portions for a day, or just a single meal, because they can't afford to pay for more than that. That means far more packaging for same amount of product as what you see in the Western countries. Latte
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Both regions have two common things. Poor populace and high temperatures. Former means that people buy their food and their personal hygiene items in portions for a day, or just a single meal, because they can't afford to pay for more than that. That means far more packaging for same amount of product as what you see in the Western countries.
First, smaller packages are not just some third-world phenomenon. In Switzerland, which is richer than the US, the average package size tends to be smaller than in North America since people buy less stuff in bulk for various reasons (houses and apartments are smaller, and there is less storage space; households have less people on average, etc.).
Second, while prepared foods (like sauces, pickled things and so on) and hygenic products are obviously packaged, people in poor countries do not buy individually
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On your initial point, you have been lied to. For starters, Swiss houses are around the European average. If you want really small housing, you'll have to go to Netherlands. Second, this has no impact on portions. European portions been generally smaller than US is overwhelmingly for cultural reasons, not practical. Frankly, we eat less and consume less. None of these portions look anything even remotely like what you'll see around the major plastic expunging rivers such as Nile. There, portions are often i
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The actual problem here is that plastic is almost impossible to recycle when it's not properly cleaned and separated. Which is only really possible to to at the point of origin.
It's actually pretty easy if you just mandate that all plastic things should have a recycling mark placed upon them, which we should have done long ago. I throw away bunches of plastic packaging (like blister packs) simply because the people who made it were too cheap to stamp a number in a triangle on it. Meanwhile, my nearest supermarket (Harvest in Fort Bragg) is good enough to use compostable PET trays under their house-wrapped meat products. In my opinion, the best solution is to mandate that all packa
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Recycling mark doesn't magically sort the plastic, nor remove dirt from it.
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Recycling mark doesn't magically sort the plastic, nor remove dirt from it.
It makes it possible to cost-effectively sort the plastic with minimum-wage workers. Removing the dirt can be done after it is shredded.
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Yes, that is what recyclers like to advertise. In reality, doing this is exceedingly expensive, which is why it's never done. Which is why China no longer takes the dirty plastic. Not even from nations in Europe, where all plastic has been marked for a long time now.
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Well, it's a fair point, although I think there are probably opportunities there, by making it cheaper. But I think it would be easier to get people to clean their recyclables than it would be to sort them.
I still would like to see all packaging be mandated to be compostable, and marked.
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Former suggestion is a massive hit to environment. Food waste and resources needed to produce extra food alone would dwarf the costs of current problems with plastics.
And quality of life in poorer countries would simply crash. Right now, one of the key reasons why they can afford things like toothpaste, shampoo and meat is because it can be easily and cheaply packaged into portions of "one serving" and be distributed such that they do not spoil quickly while cost of the packaging is essentially negligible.
"
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Former suggestion is a massive hit to environment. Food waste and resources needed to produce extra food alone would dwarf the costs of current problems with plastics.
I have no idea what you're on about, and I don't think you do either. Do you mean compostable packaging? You know it lasts just fine if you keep it out of sunlight, right? Many, many products are already packaged in compostables.
You could see this well in the recent moral panic about "microplastics" which the prominent journalists intentionally conflated with plastics in the oceans killing fish and this in turn was conflated with consumer plastics in the West.
You do know that a bunch of our plastic gets put on barges which never actually reach their destinations... on purpose, right? Or perhaps you don't.
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>You know it lasts just fine if you keep it out of sunlight, right?
And poor countries are known for their lack of direct sunlight and short travelling distances, absolutely not done on foot. Have you tried doing 2+2 yet?
Or are you of an opinion that crushing majority of humanity lives in developed countries, rather than a tiny fraction?
>You do know that a bunch of our plastic gets put on barges which never actually reach their destinations... on purpose, right? Or perhaps you don't.
I see you didn't re
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And poor countries are known for their lack of direct sunlight and short travelling distances, absolutely not done on foot. Have you tried doing 2+2 yet?
Have you tried carrying a bunch of stuff with no bag yet? Are you new?
That study solidly debunked the claim that North Americans and Europeans can do something about this problem by reducing their consumption. They can't, because they're not the source of overwhelming majority of it.
OK, so compostable packaging is a good idea everywhere, not the USA. If you get near a point, make it.
My other point was that plastics that kill birds are actually quite large, a typically measured in millimetres.
What's the relevance of that fact to the conversation?
"Microplastics", the scare of the month that came a couple of months ago is actually about tiny fibres that are small enough to pass through cellular walls that are, as far as we know, completely metabolically inert. They don't do anything.
Why would you think they were metabolically inert? Why would you think that's the only fact of relevance if it was?
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So you just plain went full retard on point one, pretended really hard that obvious was concealed in point two, just forgot the entire latter part of discussion in earlier post in point three, and finally decided to just go full retard in point four.
Ok. Good luck.
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And marked with labels large enough that I (age 68) don't have to get out my magnifying glass to read them.
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My time is valuable to me. Unless your cultural shift somehow changes that, I can't see it.
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Certainly. All plastic packaging is unusable, and you'll have to fiddle with bioedegradeable crap that keeps tearing, and keeps letting your products spoil early.
When enough people become free riders in the certain market, everyone begins to suffer, including the free riders.
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Washing: I presume the problem is trying to get enough soapy(?) water in and out of narrow necked bottles to sufficiently clean them. Easy to do at home, not so easy on an industrial scale.
But then it occurred to me that it shouldn't be hard to slice open the plastic bottles on an industrial scale, using some kind of shredding machine, and then washing would be much faster. (I suppose it still takes a lot of soapy water.) Wouldn't that work?
Sorting is, I admit, a different question, and maybe that's the
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No. There are no meaningful ways to wash and sort plastic at the recycler that are even remotely cost efficient. You need slave labour level salaries for it to be workable, and even then, most of plastic will not be recyclable. Only large plastic objects (those that weight several kilos each at least) will be recyclable that way. Smaller will be dumped, as has been the case before.
If you can invent a way to actually do what you're asking, patent it and become a billionnaire. The sheer amount of money to be
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Or the opposite, since the discussion about robotics and AI replacing workers has been ongoing since the 1950s.
On the other hand, economic efficiency of modern world just keeps lifting people out of abject poverty, making places where this sort of economic activity is actually viable more rare every year. Which is notably, one of the main reasons why China no longer takes dirty plastics.
I live in a desert (Score:2)
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Then you'll probably have to deal with the fact that food spoils really fast in your desert, because you'll only have biodegradable packaging available.
What goes around, comes around.
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What high horse? I didn't say anything about European Union, because saying anything about it would be utterly meaningless. Each country has a distinct culture and distinct policies on the issue.
It's like saying "America" meaning every country on both American continents. Do they have common policy on how to handle plastic recycling?
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Yes, hot water is worth it.
Mining Subsidy Dictates Recycling Market (Score:5, Interesting)
Fifteen years ago, China could not afford to waste the equivalent of the USA's General Mining Act of 1872. Signed by Ulysses S. Grant to speed western expansion during Apache Indian Wars etc, GMA set price of extraction on Federal Lands at $5 per acre, no royalties, no cleanup cost (14 of 15 largest USA Superfund Sites are hard rock mines on federal land). At least, China was not willing to let Australian, EU and USA mining and forestry companies operate on Chinese land without those subsidies. Recycling therefore won in the marketplace.
Today China is trying to develop virgin material extraction industry to compete with BHP, Alcoa, etc., and has the capital.
So the value of raw materials that had already been refined (value added) could be recognized by hand much more cheaply than extraction, but China CP now sees development of virgin material as a priority. What the WSJ article fails to consider is China's experience with rare earth metals - they can ban export and import, but remove the ban whenever someone else invests in competing with them. Right now, the prices of recycled scrap have dropped to a point where I'd expect China to start buying them again. Then ban them if the price goes up (using raw materials supplies they have developed). Just like USA refnining industry did to scrappers in the 1950s and 60s. Usually recyclables collected are not wasted, it's a question of price, and Chinese buying gave USA scrappers a lot of relief 15 years ago from the price command and control power of USA raw material purchasers. Like rare earth metal mining, this is about leverage.
Too late (Score:2)
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I'm in an area now with private hauling. I hate all the trucks and waste, I hate the horrible service (most of my issues are billing related which isn't an issue with municipal service) and I hate having to fire my stupid incompetent hauler every year or two and re
A lot of trash disposal has actually gotten worse (Score:2)
... a big issue especially in the US is that we don't burn our trash anymore. Now to be clear when I advocate for burning trash, I'm advocating for burning it at a very high temperature of around 3000 degrees as they typically do in Western Europe.
This statement gets a knee jerk reaction from people that don't understand waste disposal. To get around some of the initial assumptions, I'll point out that burning trash is actually a big part of waste disposal in Europe and used to be a big part of waste dispos
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Like here @44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
3000 degrees, I'm sure. Much better than the trash compactors on the Death Star.
This is wrong (Score:2)
Recycling is STUPID (Score:2)
I know we've all been raised on the recyclist propaganda; but, could we just stop it already?
Paper: The largest land owner in my home state, NC, is a forester. The raise southern pine trees for the paper and wood industries. Trees are a CROP plant. The paper, plywood, and lumber industries do NOT want trees from old growth forests. They want trees that are all of the same size, have been grown to be straight, and will go through their equipment with the minimum of attention. On the back end, landfills
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Cardboard (Corrugated and not) is pretty much second only to metals in terms of recycling, and most of that is done domestically.
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What I'm seeing here is that scrap recycling stuff is cheap as hell right now ("prices plummeted")... considering that scrap and waste are not going away any time soon, this seems like THE mark in history to buy cheap scrap futures/stock now while I can. Mark my words and I'll link to this post from my Yacht in 20 years.
Ironically, your yacht was broken up for scrap in 2034.
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My yacht was broken up in 1993, after the US Navy sold it to the Australian Navy for parts, and they sent it to the breakers in Bangladesh after they'd pulled what they wanted. For my time on the yacht (back in early 70s), I earned one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Navy-To... [amazon.com]
Re:You can't recycle everything (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to talk "used to"s, we used to buy things that were high quality, durable and repairable and keep them for generations. Recycling was as simple as handing it down.
When people don't produce things for a living, they don't know how to recognize the quality under the pretty paint. That secondary effect is compounds the loss of the industries.
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What we really need is a war on Christmas. Also Amazon.
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There's some truth in what you say, but some of it is not so truthy. My parents' cars back in the 60s were lucky to last 90,000 miles. (At least that's what the odometers said; I suppose they could have been turned back.) Back to the future: my 91 Corolla had enough miles on it when I finally sold it to have gone to the Moon (at perigee), and it was still driveable. My wife's 99 Camry is looking like it will do the same, and most of the other cars I've owned recently are similar (a few got into accident
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Cars have definitely improved, and I believe will hit the point where most are obsolete or wrecked before they wear out with the electric generation. But those are heavily recycled.
I'm thinking of things like appliances which have seen a huge drop but more things like clothes, tables, chairs, sofas, dressers, beds, children's toys that used to last generations, toy boxes, etc. Tons of the common everyday household items have severely degraded in durability.
I've seen sofas go for 50 years with one reupholste
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And you're making the exact mistake that everybody today seems to make - short term thinking. If you look at the cost of always having a sofa over your lifetime for example, buying four or five cheap trash ones instead of one that lasts your lifetime and can be handed down is a very different comparison. The one that lasts a lifetime is much cheaper.
When I left home in the 80s, most of the furniture I took with me had been handed down to my parents by my grandparents and was still in perfect condition thoug
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When it comes to wood, paper, and cardboard, we should just bury it. I recall a well know scientist (not known well enough for me to remember his name right now) saying how we should sequester carbon by growing trees and using it for lumber, when we tear down the houses the wood should just be buried in a landfill.
That's Dr. Patrick Moore.
http://ecosense.me/2017/01/10/... [ecosense.me]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Dr. Moore was an early member of Greenpeace. He had to leave because the organization was losing sight of the science behind environmental protection and people in the organization stopped listening to him. Dr. Moore was originally anti-nuclear power but now sees nuclear power as valuable for reducing human impact on the environment. He's not a fan of wind and solar power.
It seems that recycling glass and plastic a
find a doctor who says what you like to hear (Score:2)
Parent... but nearly all humans too:
You have the ability to choose sources who stoke your ego but you ultimately hurt yourself and possibly others (whether you have the "right" is seriously debatable.)
Facts can be found which help almost any side; cogent arguments can also be found as well-- not a priority for most people. The #1 thing is to feel good and people won't admit they do that; they'll spent more mental effort rationalizing their irrational behavior because it's a defensive survival emotion drivi
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Okay, atomic wanker.
Meet Klaus Traube, former nuclear engineer who knew more about it than you will ever know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]