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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Recycling is useless because the process takes more energy than mining new except for a few select materials. It’s a feel good exercise in wastefulness.

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As mined materials start to get more scarce, their prices will rise, and mining companies will have increased power over markets. You can see recycling as a kind of "intertemporal power smoothing", depriving mining companies of future economic power by reducing the rate at which materials are mined. Economic concentration of power imposes tremendous externalities, most of which are felt by ordinary people in the form of price increases and political disenfranchisement due to lobbying and outright corruption.

I am willing to pay an energy premium today in order to avoid that human rights premium in the future. You may not be so willing, but I would urge you to consider that position.

As price rises, recycling will be more advantageous and will compete with mined materials reducing their future economic power by the same amount as it would if you recycle now.

The maximum effect of your policy will be to delay the moment when recycling becomes economic advantageous, and waste money/energy until then.

Good point. I guess we have solar as an example of that, but solar was also heavily subsidized by the US gov't.

But nonetheless, depletion of that resource or resources will slow down? Energy could be harvested from renewable energy for recycling? Bottom line for me sounds better for our world then mining new till we run out of something?

> Recycling is useless because the process takes more energy than mining new except for a few select materials. It’s a feel good exercise in wastefulness.

I would disagree. There is a benefit to keeping these materials out of a landfill.

Saying we should just throw everything into a landfill because that uses the least energy is not considering the other benefits of diverting waste from the landfill.

The damaging effects of modern landfills are so low as to be effectively negligible.

As traditional mining becomes more expensive, recycling certain metals becomes the new mining.

Also, certain plastics are very easy to recycle, so it's already profitable, I suppose.

Otherwise, you can see landfills as future mining sites, when technology improves.

Always recycle aluminum though!

Yeah, it's not like waste is going to end up in landfills or oceans anyway.

Strong statement - any data to back it up?

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