California City Discovers It Doesn't Actually Know Where 60% of Its Recycling Goes (nbcnews.com) 92
Palo Alto, California began investigating where its recycling goes over four years ago, reports NBC News. The results?
Palo Alto's best reckoning, today, is that about 40% of its recyclable material stays in North America, where it's supposed to be processed according to strict environmental and labor standards. The other roughly 60% goes abroad, mainly to Asia, with next to no transparency about its fate.
Experts say cities and towns across the United States would probably have similar difficulty in determining how much of their recyclables are actually recycled. "If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that's not achieving a good goal," said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. "That's not what the whole idea was of recycling."
The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city's recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons. Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck. "It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems," they wrote in a report published this year....
Palo Alto officials said they've taken two lessons from this saga. First, they want to recycle more in the U.S.... If made permanent, staff said, the change could increase the average citizen's recycling bill by about $33 a year. The second lesson, City Manager Ed Shikada said, is that Palo Alto can't transform the global recycling system alone. In March the city began talks with other interested California cities to discuss possible reforms at the local or state levels. The group includes San Jose, the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about a dozen other Northern California municipalities. Shikada said they might seek to expand recycling capacity in California, for instance, or ask lawmakers to impose new transparency requirements on companies that export recyclable goods.
The article cites World Bank estimates that only about 9% of waste ultimately gets recycled in East Asia and Pacific region. "The balance goes to landfills and incinerators or into nature, with local and global consequences.... Research suggests countries in Southeast Asia rank among the top global sources of ocean plastic."
Experts say cities and towns across the United States would probably have similar difficulty in determining how much of their recyclables are actually recycled. "If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that's not achieving a good goal," said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. "That's not what the whole idea was of recycling."
The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city's recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons. Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck. "It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems," they wrote in a report published this year....
Palo Alto officials said they've taken two lessons from this saga. First, they want to recycle more in the U.S.... If made permanent, staff said, the change could increase the average citizen's recycling bill by about $33 a year. The second lesson, City Manager Ed Shikada said, is that Palo Alto can't transform the global recycling system alone. In March the city began talks with other interested California cities to discuss possible reforms at the local or state levels. The group includes San Jose, the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about a dozen other Northern California municipalities. Shikada said they might seek to expand recycling capacity in California, for instance, or ask lawmakers to impose new transparency requirements on companies that export recyclable goods.
The article cites World Bank estimates that only about 9% of waste ultimately gets recycled in East Asia and Pacific region. "The balance goes to landfills and incinerators or into nature, with local and global consequences.... Research suggests countries in Southeast Asia rank among the top global sources of ocean plastic."
US Military are disciplined professionals (Score:3)
I have this great idea for a new TV show. The premise is simple. Just toss a liberal celebrity into the ring with a couple of Marines ...
Fatal flaw in your logic. The celebrity will be completely safe, regardless of any personal beliefs of those Marines. Marines protect American citizens, even those they may personally dislike.
The military is not an armed and/or angry mob. They are disciplined professionals.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and no.
The opening line to the marine oath:
“I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
So, no, marines aren't rabid animals but it's right there in their oath that simply being American is not a magic shield, either.
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Good thing the guy who wants to eliminate the Constitution just admitted it on a public forum for all to see, so our Armed Forces know who the threat is.
Re: US Military are disciplined professionals (Score:1)
color me surprised (Score:2)
People have a right to plot to overthrow the government? News to me. Pretty sure that's been illegal for a while now, events of the mid 19th century have tightened up some of those imaginary rights.
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America has a history of acting against those with undesirable views, even taking legal actions. The red scare and McCarthyism for example. The very first congress passed laws to repressed freedom of the press. The constitution has some high minded ideals that the government has never lived up to. That's the reason why people bristle at suggestions to start persecuting based upon belief or politics, because this has happened in the past and is quite possible to happen again, and we've got a epidemic of stu
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It's a sticky problem. Who can we trust to make the judgement. It's probably reasonable for the government to do some of it if we have a government where the legislature is elected and truly represents the interests of the people. Term limits can help for some offices that wield a disproportionate amount of power. Ideally there needs to be a lot of transparency so that the general population can feel like their government is listening to them, being honest with them, and spending money wisely. We're by no m
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When I was growing up, we had to pass a constitution test to graduate from junior high school. Which meant that everyone had to know enough of it to pass a test and no one could claim ignorance of it. It seems our town was possibly in the minority.
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Good thing the guy who wants to eliminate the Constitution just admitted it on a public forum for all to see, so our Armed Forces know who the threat is.
That's speech, not action. So no, not a domestic enemy. Just another dipshit on the net, tv, radio, etc. No more than the far left that says the US is irredeemable and revolution is needed. It's all protected speech.
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Yes and no.
The opening line to the marine oath:
“I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
So, no, marines aren't rabid animals but it's right there in their oath that simply being American is not a magic shield, either.
Yes, but merely being a far left liberal does not make one a domestic enemy, no more than far right conservative. One has to transition from peaceful political to actual violent action, not rehetorical, actual, to become a domestic enemy.
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I entirely agree but did not want to refer directly back to the OP/troll/copy-pasta clown.
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Someone who thinks anyone liberal, or even just to the left of far right, is an enemy needs to step outside of their hot-box bubble before the oxygen runs out.
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Maybe not beaten but there's quite a high probability of getting raped.
No, there is not. Unwanted sexual contact is not synonymous with rape. That said, a service member who fondles another should be thrown out and prosecuted.
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a service member who fondles another should be thrown out and prosecuted.
Good luck with finding any kind of accountability in the military. Why do you think the rates of rape & sexual assault are so high?
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a service member who fondles another should be thrown out and prosecuted.
Good luck with finding any kind of accountability in the military. Why do you think the rates of rape & sexual assault are so high?
Rape rates are not as high as you claim. The statistics you cite is for all unwanted sexual contact. The far more common yet completely unacceptable fondling inflates your numbers. I know women who have been victims of both, while both are a type of sexual assault they are not equivalent types of assaults.
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Gotta hand it to you, your copypasta still works. Suckers.
Executive summary (Score:5, Insightful)
They were only able to track 40% of their recyclables. They can't track where 60% ends up going.
Given past discoveries about recycling sent overseas, the assumption is that 60% is NOT being handled responsibly. But they don't actually know.
Re:Executive summary (Score:5, Insightful)
They were only able to track 40% of their recyclables. They can't track where 60% ends up going.
Given past discoveries about recycling sent overseas, the assumption is that 60% is NOT being handled responsibly. But they don't actually know.
If the companies aren't forthcoming on where the recyclables are going you can bet the stuff isn't being recycled. If it was being recycled they'd eagerly come out and say so.
Claiming they can't say because of business reasons is a cop out. The city should drop them, find new companies to recycle and include as part of the contract a requirement to disclose where the recyclables are going.
Re:Executive summary (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, they should, you're right.
However, the reality is that if they were to try that, they would find that most of what they're trying to recycle, can't actually be recycled. That would be... embarrassing.
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Politicians in general tend to favor the coverup rather than just admit they might be wrong. We also share some blame in that as well, it's politically inviable to admit mistakes becasue your opponent will use it against you and chances are you won't get the votes despite the fact that most people would say being able to admit and correct mistakes is a redeemable quality in people.
Re:Executive summary (Score:5, Informative)
The city should drop them, find new companies to recycle
Find new recycling companies .... where? This is the inconvenient truth -- proper recycling, *PROPER RECYCLING*, is not an economically viable business.
Nobody is willing to start a business so they can lose money, and the *ONLY* way you make money in the recycling business is by cheating -- saying that you are recycling but actually just shipping stuff off to a landfill in a foreign country.
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Isn't it? I am working on two projects that exactly do that, handle accumulation, sorting and processing of waste. The people who finance these projects aren't exactly philanthropists. But it sure seems that processing waste is a viable business.
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it sure seems that processing waste is a viable business.
There are legal mandates for trash sorting, but there's no legal mandates for actually making sure that the sorted trash gets recycled, and nobody can do it profitably. All plastics can be recycled unprofitably through fluid bed pyrolysis, so it's a matter of will and not technology.
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People aren't going to like the alternative to recycling. Cutting off the consumption end of things, with some pretty serious economic consequences given the last 75 years of being a consumer dominated economy. Producing things is too much work compared to stocking shelves with cheap junk and blasting their brains with marketing to buy it.
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I'm not saying there aren't other things you could do that would make you even MORE money; there are. But that's true of a lot of things that people do for a living anyway.
Re:Executive summary (Score:4, Insightful)
The city should drop them, find new companies to recycle and include as part of the contract a requirement to disclose where the recyclables are going.
They aren't going to find companies that actually recycle un-separated trash at a reasonable cost. Anywhere.
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You know, screw all these robots that play chess and patrol parking lots. What we really need are robots that can reliably separate out recylables from trash, and do it by type of material.
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> recylables from trash, and do it by type of material.
This exists, and is what recycling companies already do.
The first thing you do is break/shred the trash into reasonably-sized pieces. This is easy to do automatically and makes the remaining steps easier.
Next, separate out the iron and most of the steel, using electromagnets. This is easy and profitable. You get a tiny percentage of other metals in the resulting steel (either becaus
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> the contract a requirement to disclose where the recyclables are going.
I can tell you what's happening:
The metals and glass are separated out by various (mostly automatic) means and recycled, because they're worth money. That's the good news.
The plastics are shipped to the third world, where somebody who makes less than a dollar a day picks through them looking for the 1% of plastics that are actually legitimately recy
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Any politician who comes out in favor of a REAL recycling plan, and all the associated expense, will quickly find themself voted out of office and replaced by a politician backed by the big polluters.
And so, everyone always takes the safe, cheap, easy way out. Send all your trash to some
Plastic, plastic, plastic (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably time to give up on the hope of recycling plastic and really that's what these recycling stories center around since metal will always be valued to recycle. Paper and glass also are much easier to recycle and don't carry the same environmental risks.
Especially seems like the shady efforts to recycle plastic have led to more of it contaminating the environment than if we just properly landfilled it in the first place.
More effective is just regulate packaging and single use to move industries to just use less plastic for things that could be replaced with paper and metals.
Burning plastic to generate electricity? (Score:2)
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Some do for sure, I know that has it's other issues to manage but it has potential.
Landfills also generate electricity as the decomposition generates methane that is burned for energy.
Either way both are a controllable end of the waste chain instead of this mystery box scenario that recycling is creating.
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Some do for sure, I know that has it's other issues to manage but it has potential.
Landfills also generate electricity as the decomposition generates methane that is burned for energy.
Either way both are a controllable end of the waste chain instead of this mystery box scenario that recycling is creating.
Well the plastics in the landfill are not generating much of the methane. :-) Also, I think the places burning plastic are burning all sorts of trash. Including things that could decompose. So incineration may be a win for more than plastics.
Re: Burning plastic to generate electricity? (Score:2)
Actually, I've had an increase in garbage disposal tax because the city now provides too little plastic to the disposal companies to run their burners without adding gas, and gas is expensive.
Recycling is expensive if you don't burn the plastic. And the burning is generating heat that can be reused (if designed up front), so not a total loss.
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Hey, no worries, buddy. There are programs to help you. Try your state government first. You can definitely get food and shelter at the minimum.
Re:Plastic, plastic, plastic (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe should tell the paper mills that, recycled paper usage has actually gone up (68% in 2021 was one statistic I could find, majority going into cardboard boxes)
It's not like the process of turning wood into paper is energy free and doesnt also require cleaning and separation.
Not every paper can be recycled but theres a reason every retail store I have every seen or worked at bales it's cardboard and sells it back to recyclers: there's use for it and mills are willing to pay money for it.
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Every paper can be recycled into inferior paper, but it costs more to deal with white paper because it has clay content that you have to dispose of. It can be recycled a max of something like 7-8 times before the fibers get too short and the only thing you can make with it is sprayed pulp slurry products like those brown packing inserts.
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Hey I love some good pedantry as much as the the next guy but recycling the same mass of paper "only" 7-8 times before it can "only" be turned into always sought after packing material is a win win considering the final step in the chain is still useful and also biodegradable. If it made it to a landfill after 8 runs in the recycler and some turns at being pulp that's more than acceptable and worth the effort of recycling.
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The problem is that it takes a bunch of water. We really just need to promote reuse over recycling at this point. You can do all of this without much in the way of waste with more energy, but we don't have a lot to spare right now.
I fear central control as much as the next guy, but this whole thing where anyone can make practically whatever they want without having to worry about the eventual disposal is really unsustainable.
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Yeah, most recycled paper goes into one kind of cardboard or another. You can buy actual paper (notebook paper, printer paper, whatever) that's made from recycled paper, but it always costs more than new paper, partly because it's a specialty product and so economies of scale don't favor it, but also partly because of the cost of removing all the ink, which is a pain. Making recycled paper into cardboard is just more pract
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With some minor notes.
"Hard" plastics are easy to collect. Requires a bit of effort to handle. But can be done.
"Softer" ones, like store bags are harder to collect. Will routinely "fly off", and end up in random places, including the nature and oceans. As you said, they could easily be replaced. (I would guess, almost with certainty, the initial push for plastic bags were "for the nature", killing trees for paper after all).
So, how is it going to be processed?
Recycling does not work due to 40+ different ext
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(I would guess, almost with certainty, the initial push for plastic bags were "for the nature", killing trees for paper after all).
Yes, plastic bags were sold as environmentally friendly, you don't cut down trees and you use less water. Except the bags get loose (as you say) and you wind up with plastic bag forests.
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There's a company in Australia that's getting some serious backing who claim to have the world's most advanced hydrothermal liquefaction technology. The company is called Licella, and basically, they turn plastic back into oil [licella.com].
There's so many question marks, of course, and I have no idea whether it will ever scale enough. They've been working with Nestle and Dow, but that could just be a token investment on their part to greenwash their waste.
Still, I hope they succeed. Nobody wants the inevitable micro
First question is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do they not know this information? It should have been in the contracts issued, but it would seem to have been "not wanted."
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Because the city staffers say, "they're stuck".
Which I take to mean that they know exactly what's going on but know that charging $33 extra will mean heads roll and pensions terminate.
Virtue signaling is all well n good until there's a price to pay. Then it's mighty inconvenient and they're just stuck. Can't do a thing! Throw hands up and done. Golly!
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I use my recycling bin but I have no illusion with regards to what percentage is actually recycled. I just figure that it will make my trash easier to sort out.
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Same here. The boxes n paper stuff tends to be bulky so nice big blue bin is a convenient way to not have to empty the kitchen trash every 5 seconds. I'd still have 2 cans but it fits better this way.
When I lived in NYC years ago you could see the trash barges going to New Jersey every day to fill the dumps. Yech, some basic recycling will cut down on that sort of thing, too.
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Politics. Since the eighties at least, if not longer, people haven't been allowed to admit that certain things aren't actually recyclable in practice, because the liberals will shout at you and make your life hell. That goes double for anyone working in politics or government. It's actually politically safer to say "we don't know for sure where it all goes" rather than "most of the plastic ultimately gets incinerated". This is *why* recycling companies ship stu
Re:Goes into Ocean, via China (Score:4, Insightful)
By the 1970s that was no longer working. The land fills were filling up and people were becoming concerned with things like unbiodegradable waste, CFCs, ground water contamination, etc. So, corporations did another marketing blitz and started trumping up recycling. Prior to that it was focused almost entirely on metals, glass, and newspapers. Everything else, especial plastic, was just trash. The recycling symbol you see on the bottom of plastic products? Its a sham. Its not the 'real' recycling symbol. More marketing spin to get you to feel good about padding these corporation's bottom lines. Plastic is not profitably recyclable and never has been. The only people who have EVER claimed that were corporate mouthpieces, not the 'tree-huggers' you are complaining about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBGZtNJAt-M
Why do cities/judges etc bow to contracts? (Score:3)
It is not that hard to put in rules like "Hey, you want to do business with us, you have to tell us X, you are not allowed to keep it as a business secret?
And judges should simply tell everyone that a contract only gives monetary penalties, while judicial penalties are imprisonement until you break speak.
There is no law that says a contract lets you not obey a judge's direct order to respond to a question.
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That would be politically ruinous for the city officials, because then they would *officially* know that most of the plastic is getting incinerated, and that would be very bad, possibly career-ending. It's not politically acceptable to know the truth about plastic recycling (namely, that it's not actually practical). It goes against the inviolable sacrosanct doctrine of the political left. You *have* to pretend that it's being recycled.
And you can o
Require "recycling" cos to list recycle rates. (Score:2)
Different values than Biden Admin ... (Score:3)
"If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that's not achieving a good goal," said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. "That's not what the whole idea was of recycling."
Those are different values than the Biden Administration. It seems the Administration considers it a great win when you can outsource the pollution and superficially improve the domestic statistics. Look at oil production. It's good to shift production from the US to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. It makes the US stats look better. It doesn't matter that domestic consumption is the same. Greenwashing for the political win.
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It doesn't matter that domestic consumption is the same.
Except for the extra fuel burned to ship it here instead of using what's here. (And the CO2 from that goes into the same atmosphere, so it's a substantial lose for those who were trying to reverse global warming by shutting down US oil production.)
And then there's the ocean and other pollution from oil processing under some other countries' more lax standards (or enforcement).
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Can't you wait til you find an article directly related to Biden's energy policy to take shots at him? You analogy is quite a stretch.
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Can't you wait til you find an article directly related to Biden's energy policy to take shots at him? You analogy is quite a stretch.
Actually it's not. Its contrasting those attempting to actually made a difference with those trying to manufacture the perception of making a difference while in reality they are just moving nastiness out of sight.
The comment is really about Bourque, someone doing the right thing. Biden is just a well known example to contrast against.
Seems simple to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
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If a recycler won't tell you where it goes, they no longer get your business. I thought California was tough about this.
No you don't understand. It's no longer in your hands and now you get to claim the moral high ground. "We recycled responsibly, we paid someone to do a thing!" *takes breath* "OMG China is so polluting there's plastic going in the oceans, how dare they!"
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If a recycler won't tell you where it goes, they no longer get your business.
And if *NO* recycling company will tell you exactly what they do with the trash they handle .... then what?
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Re: Seems simple to me. (Score:2)
They might not want to. Is trash collection handled by private companies? Trusting the free market to perform public service is generally not a great idea, as private companies do not care about public interest and will degrade service quality in order to be more competitive and earn public contracts. Doesn't the city have its own trash collection and management department? Where I live it does and it's great.
Re: Seems simple to me. (Score:2)
Obviously ... (Score:4, Funny)
They need a *giant* blue bin -- I know 100% of my recycling goes into my regular-sized one. :-)
Recycling is a great idea but.. (Score:5, Informative)
But a lot of places have chaotic societies and failed governments. Expecting recycling beyond metal is just a pipe dream. And the US? Don't make me laugh. I'm a proud, patriotic US citizen. I love my country. And I support second amendment rights. But let's face some cold hard facts about ourselves. You can't even convince the average American to take a deep breath and think for a second BEFORE he shoots his assault rifle at an elementary school. You think we're gonna be able to teach Jim Bob to separate out the polyethylene terepthalate from the polystyrene? Not in a million years.
downmod in 3....2....
Re: Recycling is a great idea but.. (Score:1)
Most places from Europe to California will collect separated plastics but even those are too contaminated. Just 1 bottle cap in a bag of recycled plastic bottles is enough contamination to make the entire thing go to the landfill. So the separation is a feel-good measure at best, in most cases it contributes to the problem as now you need 2 trucks (or more expensive trucks that carry less) and 2 bins and 2 streams until it gets to someplace where itâ(TM)s all just combined again.
Plastics, being hydroca
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Only the metal get reliably recycled because it's really valuable. The rest of it mostly gets landfilled.
Don't use your own shitty government to label a practice used successfully around the world. Metal may be valuable but that doesn't stop countries such as the Netherlands recycling close to 90% of paper and glass (and yes traceably).
Plastic is a bit more difficult, but even then the answer is not landfill, but rather heat reclamation (reads: incineration) but the percentage of circular plastic is rising every day in countries that actually give a shit.
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https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/socie... [www.cbs.nl]
Except that includes ALL WASTE, including construction and demolition waste. That probably means that they're including recycled concrete, which weighs a TON and is actually really advantageous to reuse. That's great, but I bet that swamps out residential recycling, which is probably a LOT lower.
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The only problem is if it becomes economical to import garbage to recycle. Mexican cartels smuggling empty bottles across the border and Chinese fishing boats harvesting the Pacific garbage patch in order to get that b
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A simple solution is to add a $.15 tax on each bottle, fully refundable at a recycling center.
There are plenty of us on here old enough to remember when they did that for glass bottles in the U.S. You'd get charged a nickel or so as a deposit for your bottle, and you'd save them and take them back to the grocery store on your next visit and get your deposit back.
Part of the problem is that nowadays, a lot of the stuff that was packaged in glass, paper, or metal is now packaged in plastic, so there are a hu
Net loss? (Score:2)
"If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that's not achieving a good goal,"
If the recycling isn't really being done, it isn't just a wash. It's a massive loss: Millions of manhours sorting waste into black, green, and blue (or whatever) trashcans/dumpsters. Manufacturing and distributing extra cans and dumpsters multiplying the number at every waste-generation site. Three (for instance) trucks running each route instead of one. (I could go on.)
Poor headline (Score:1)
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Engagement
Palo Alto - "The Xerox place."
California - "Hippie liberal hypocrisy land"
Ban most plastic drink bottles (Score:2)
The aluminum can is the clearly superior beverage vessel and there are those aluminium capped bottles as well if you need a lid.
Who cares if i can't see it? Are you lying to me about whats inside. Bonus is that this will drive faster development of transparent aluminum.
Re: Ban most plastic drink bottles (Score:2)
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Glass is better in some respects, but it's also heavy (higher shipping costs), takes up more room, and has more consequences for broken containers (i.e. shards of glass that can cause injury). It also has to be sorted by color for recycling.
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Step 1: Reduce Excessive Packaging (Score:4, Insightful)
Total bovine excrement from politicians (Score:3)
There is no way they can possibly have been HONESTLY ignorant of this stuff.
The politicians wrote, awarded, and were responsible for enforcing, the contracts with the garbage collectors. Those contracts either specified where the stuff went, or they did not. If the contracts did not, then the politicians were deliberately sloppy and did not WANT to know where the trash went. If the contracts specified where the stuff went, and it actually went somewhere else, then the politicians were lazy and CHOSE not to monitor whether the contracts were being honored, and having not monitored, were also not enforcing (if they chose this option, there was a REASON they chose it). You can GUARANTEE that, somewhere here, it will be discovered that politicians were giving the waste disposal contracts to political supporters, or relatives, or companies offering kick-backs, etc. There's a REASON they're now "shocked to discover gambling in the casino" (see: Casablanca) and it's almost certainly blood or money.
So the far east recycles better... (Score:2)
The US "recycles" 5-6% of plastics, and a large percentage of this is "recycled" by shipping it out. That's compared to tens of percents in the EU.
US people, being a bunch of ego maniacs, then say something like "Palo Alto can't transform the global recycling system alone", where by "global" they mean the US, and where they discount, or, more likely, aren't even aware of, any good examples elsewhere.
You don't know? (Score:2)
Recycling is in great part a fraud. All of it. Cardboard is sometimes pasteboard, they say no it isn't recyclable. Most paper packaging ditto. Glass? Not worth it often. My municipality has been shortening the list for the past few years, since recycling isn't about saving the planet or reducing landfill volume, but it's about practical expenses offset by generated revenue.
And most recycled material isn't worth it. Just ain't.
The plastic recycling myth (Score:2)
This issue has been well known for a lot longer than four years... It surfaced at least as early as the '70s and has been an ongoing battle for decades. The reason that these "recyclers" are continuously cagey about exactly where "recyclables" are going is that the vast majority of the plastic products we use on a daily basis are not actually recyclable. In order for the incredibly profitable ventures in charge of this entire mess to be able to perpetuate the myth that they're still somehow doing the right
Yeah, right... (Score:2)
Bwahahaha! ah, that's a good one. I would image $33\year with a margin of error of 1000%
Somebody needs to try recycling a GPS tracker (Score:2)