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Some of these claims seem extraordinary, e.g. some casual googling seems to indicate that recycling paper is less chemical and energy intensive than new pulp... so do you have some specific research that supports these ideas, or does it all come from the P&T episode?

Ya, there are too many factors. Turning a pile of very ink-heavy newspapers into crisp white photocopier paper takes lots of chemicals. Turning it back into a 50% content for more newsprint isn't as much of a problem.

Don't you think it takes a lot of chemicals to turn a piece of wood into crisp white paper? Hint: It does.

Then don't subsidize recycling and let the market sort out which is cheaper.

Some costs of making new stuff aren't reflected in the market price. For example the CO2 cost of refining, or the pollution cost of the factory that makes it.

Rather than tax CO2 or pollution, we instead prefer to subsidize recycling.

Why? Dunno.

Recycling has the same sort of costs. In the past year, I've been harmed more by the noise of the recycling truck than the total harm of pollution of manufacturing new materials I could have recycled.

I'm not sure its that simple, presumably part of the subsidy is that we want less physical mass/waste going into landfill so there's an argument to making recycling artificially cheap vs. making new stuff.

While I am hopeful that at some point the market will come up with solutions to recycle material from landfill, I think plastic and carbon taxes still would have a place today (doing something about fishing nets would sure go a long way though…) specifically to help reduce the material burden (or nudge drinks to go back to more aluminum cans)

It isn't intrinsically good to reduce the physical mass of landfill. Recycling is useful if it reduces the cost of manufacturing stuff plus the cost of putting trash in landfill. "Cost" means the amount of human work, minus externalities.

That episode came out ~ a decade ago, wouldn't be surprised if technological advances have changed the economics of paper recycling.

>glass

In the good old USSR there was a limited number of sizes/styles of glass bottles and jars in circulation. Each one had a deposit value, and if it had no cracks/chips and all labels were removed, it could be returned for direct reuse, i.e. no melting and further manufacturing was involved. I think it worked OK since it had existed for many decades, and energy was cheap in those days.

IIRC, that is also how they handle half liter beer bottles in places like Germany and Netherlands. As an American, I saw it and thought "Wow. That just makes so much sense. Why don't we do that?"

Perhaps one reason is that those bottles, while completely functional, tend to look pretty rough and worn out after a while, it's obvious that they've been recycled and aren't new.

Is that something a company wants to take a risk on when it comes to the psychology of consumer choice?

You can always take those too worn bottles and recycle that subset into shiny new bottles..

Market the used ones as more valuable than new.

It wasn't all that long ago we did. I remember in the mid-80's buying soda at the grocery store in 6-packs of glass bottles, and bringing the empty bottles back to the store for a discount when buying more. The empties were sent back to the bottling plant, washed, and refilled. It was really interesting seeing the branding variations, depending on the age of the bottle, on the store shelves. I still have a 60's-era 7-Up bottle that had been through around 20 years of reuse when I bought it.

In India Coca Cola or any cold drink 330ml bottles cost about Rs 30, & you get Rs 2 discount/cash-back if you bring the empty one back to the shop

We did -- at least in some places. I remember as a kid sometimes going with my parents to the local brewery. They'd bring back their empty bottles and pick up a fresh pack at a discount.

It's making something of a resurgence in popularity with the craft brewery movement in the United States and the accompanying popularity of growlers and growler fills.

Partly the reason the United States doesn't use reusable bottles anymore is because breweries became national instead of regional in the 1960s and 1970s. When your brewery is located in the same state as the beer is consumed it is easier to get the bottles back. If you are Coors and produce in one plant in Colorado it is more difficult and expensive to get your bottles back from Florida. Also the cost of shipping the heavier reusable bottles negates some of the cost savings as well.

Small dairies in the US do this. Our milk comes in glass bottles and we return them for reuse. I've always hoped this would catch on more.

Ditto. I buy milk from Homestead Creamery. Besides being the best milk I can find in Atlanta, they clean and reuse the bottles. You pay a $2 deposit, which you get back when you bring the bottles back to the store. Presumably they then ship them back to the creamery when they get the shipments of milk in.

It used to be very common. But paperboard or plastic containers are much lighter and save on transportation costs. They also don't have to be returned, cleaned, and sanitized before re-use.

>Also, landfills are able to capture and sell the methane produced from paper as it decomposes, so it makes a lot more economical and environmental sense to just throw it away.

The price of natural gas has plummeted due to fracking. So much so, that nowadays it is often more economical for drillers to burn the methane off than to build the infrastructure to sell it. I expect the same economics apply to landfills. Plus, methane is 25x as potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas (hence why it is better to burn methane than release it), so if capturing methane from landfills is at all less than perfect, decomposing paper products are still a significant environmental liability, not to mention an explosion risk. And that's just for paper, one of the most benign things you can throw away...

That has always been true. The incentive to capture methane never has been particularly high, given that transporting a gas is much more difficult than a bunch of unrefined liquids.

What bothers me is melting a glass bottle of wine to produce a new glass bottle of wine. Just remove the label and refill the same bottle with different wine! Recycling should be the last resort.

I've seen a few microbreweries re-using bottles lately, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Gives them a bit of character as a bonus too, lots will have scuffs and other markings on them from previous use/transport.

This is how German beer and much else works. Most beer, milk and bottled water is sold in one of about ten shapes of bottle. Four kinds for milk (two sizes two colours), one for water, three for beer, some lesser used that I've forgotten right now, and IIRC the market percentage for these things is 65% at the moment.

I'm sure someone will follow up to explain how horrible the situation is and all about those other 35%, but compared to the US or India it's pretty good.

To be pedantic, there are three shapes of glass bottles for mineral water. A green one for medium sparkling, white for classic sparkling and a fancy one for the hipster water.

This.

In Greece, Italy and Spain (likely elsewhere but these I have seen first hand, and never in the US of A) there are corner markets that sell very good wine from big barrels or stainless steel vats. you can buy or bring your own reusable containers, glass or plastic or whatever.

the problem is too much packaging of any kind. Buy small and local. Much more sustainable.

I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.

> how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum

I doubt they care about anything on the aluminum at all. If you watch videos of people melting down soda cans into aluminum ingots [0], there is a lot of dross or non-aluminum material that needs to be removed. Since there is already a process in place to eliminate non-aluminum material, I wouldn't worry about a bit of food.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldURYZyRYMA

If it can be cleaned off by a kitchen sink, it can definitely be cleaned off by an industrial recycling facility.

Not necessarily. A kitchen sink might spend 3min cleaning one bottle where an industrial recycling facility won't have more than a 10s budget per bottle before that bottle be deemed either clean or meltable.

> Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling.

I watched that episode and it was hardly a decent job. Penn is a staunch libertarian and that colors his presentation of the facts. Also, it is an entertainment show so they love to have something to yell "bullshit" at. There is no nuance.

For sure, in the zeal to increase recycling percentage, it was a huge mistake for cities which used to collect sorted recyclables to have a "single stream" recycling flow to make it easier for people to "recycle". No argument there.

Something that shouldn't be discounted is that it seems like a relatively simple problem to have NN image classifiers to sort the stream of waste. It doesn't need to be 99% accurate at all -- it is better that it can classify 90% of the items with near 100% accuracy and just throw away the 10% it isn't sure about, resulting in more pure recycling streams.

> when regulated and managed properly they aren't bad for the environment.

That's a bold statement I would love to see some sources for.

Paper only doesn't make sense to recycle if you externalize a lot of the costs.

For example, what if we had to pay to put something in the garbage ... as we ultimately pay China?

Then the equilibrium in the equation changes ...

I find it hard to believe the parent was failing to account for the cost of the landfill. It's the most obvious cost of that strategy, so it would be hard to miss.

On a related topic, to know that the equilibrium changes, you'd need to know the difference in cost before and after accounting for the thing you added.

This discussion would benefit significantly from careful analysis using actual numbers. If there's one thing that Bullshit! got right, it's that there are clear, empirical metrics we can use to evaluate solutions, and we should use them.

I don't know where you live, but here in California I do pay for garbage services.

> Prices for gas and oil fluctuate a lot, so it's risky for companies to be in the business of processing plastic back into feedstock because they don't know whether they will be able to sell it at or above cost at the time they're buying materials.

This is true in lots of industries that use hedging to control their exposure to commodity prices, why wouldn't that be true here?

Are you taking about dollar expensive or Joule expensive? You can easily tweak ROI as a regulator by taxing but EORI is technology and physics limited.

It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that.

But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years. Or worse, tossing it into the ocean.

> worse, tossing it into the ocean

I used to think that. Then I read this and now I'm less sure:

....the most widely-used plastic, the stuff used to make shopping bags, is the one that produces the greatest amount of these warming gases ... after 212 days in the sun, this plastic emitted 176 times more methane than at the start of the experiment. Ironically, when plastics were exposed to air the amount of methane emitted was double the level from sea water.

more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45043989

>It might not be profitable to recycle plastics- I'll give you that. But it's better than sticking it in a landfill and waiting 1000 years.

Plastics are basically forever. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and contaminate the environment (they've found commercially sold sea salt contaminated with micro-plastics).

With the exception of the plastics that are biodegradable (expensive and extremely uncommon) and the ones that we've discovered worms can eat.