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Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see stories revolving around this sort of thing, I'm always reminded of the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode they did on recycling (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/). They argue that landfills really aren't that bad and may actually be better than recycling. Of course the entire _premise_ of that show was that you shouldn't just blindly believe everything you're told -- INCLUDING what the show itself tries to argue for. So I have no idea how valid any of their argument actually is.

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If I recall their entire argument was based on whether or not something financially worth it. And so they recommended recycling aluminum, because aluminum is worth so much. Whereas everything else loses money.

If it were true that recycling plastic were better for the environment, but was a financial loss I'd be for it. I'm not sure this is true, but the point is that purely financial considerations miss the bigger picture here.

As other HN posters have pointed out, it seems that fewer disposable plastic containers is the better path here. (really, as few as possible!)

That was certainly something they talked about and focused on. But I recall that they also talked about how landfills take up such a ridiculously small amount of land, and they are so efficiently managed these days, that it's not even really an environmental issue either. I'll have to rewatch the episode, but they may have even suggested it was _better_ for the environment to throw it out, because the energy involved in recycling was actually worse.

Similarly: I have a friend who recently told me they were trying to get away from using disposable paper towels and instead use cloths. Again, this episode immediately came to mind. I couldn't help but wonder if the amount of energy, detergent, etc used in washing the reusable towels was _worse_ than simply using paper towels.

I don't know that there is any true way to definitively answer either of these questions. There's just SO MUCH involved, that you can go down a million rabbit holes (the manufacture of the washer uses X, the design required a team that required an office that was built inefficiently, etc). This is currently a premise on The Good Place: no matter how hard you try to be the best possible person, you can't control the entire pipeline of ramifications.

I think part of what ought to happen (and likely won't) is simply for people to change their behaviors.

Many things do not need hazardous detergents to clean. If something is sufficiently dry, it can easily be sterile enough to be considered clean. And so, a gross-looking rag might not necessarily be unhealthy. Further, people could just own "categories" of rags: one for cleaning the house, one for work with cars and machinery, one for biological use, etc. And each of those could be treated separately so as to reduce chemical usage.

I'm not confident people would ever do this, instead just that avoiding some of these problems is not conceptually difficult. That's more of a problem of behaviorism and consumerism. (and, as you point out, education)

[edit]

I do agree with your point, though. Apparently you can compost paper towels, too. So as long as you're not cleaning anything you can put on your lawn, you don't even need further transportation costs to dispose of or recycle.

Consider: it might be cheaper in total long-term ROI to dispose of things in landfill now, and then let people a hundred years from now dig them back up if they have need for the materials then, than to recycle those things right now. And by “cheaper”, I mean for the entire economy that includes both us and the hypothetical future people digging those things up! Our recycling now might have lower ROI (higher costs, less reclamation efficiency) than their digging-up + recycling would! (This is actually a thing in archaeology: frequently sites that are hard to dig up will be left to future archaeologists who—it is assumed—will be able to reclaim them more cheaply and effectively than we can today.)

It’s sort of like the “bargain” of cryptocurrencies: what promotes long-term GDP growth more, bank fees or massive electricity use? Crypto miners are hurting the environment right now; but they pay for their own externalities. Banks impose fees that lower net productivity in a way that might mean that the companies/technologies that we need to reach sustainability take longer to come into existence. So will we be in a better place with 100 years of crypto mining + 100 years of an economy [including green industry] that was spurred on no bank fees; or vice versa? The question doesn’t have an immediate, intuitive answer.

A stupid but weirdly-precise analogy: when playing an RTS like Starcraft, anything that slows down your “economy” (mineral mining) prevents you from “teching up” as quickly as your opponent. In humanity’s case, our opponent is Malthusian resource starvation (in the small—of individual resources) and habitat loss from climate change. Anything that slows down our economy from “teching up” to face these problems, for a reward of merely moving around in time our ability to use our resources (rather than decreasing permanent losses/increasing permanent gains of resources), isn’t really worth it, if we’re “racing the clock.” (That’s a big, hotly-debated “if”, of course.)

> what promotes long-term GDP growth more, bank fees or massive electricity use?

Assuming they have the same cost, bank fees promote more GDP growth, hands down, at any time horizon.

Money simply changing hands will always beat money changing hands with added useless usage of resources and labor.

And that's not even considering the reality, that average electricity costs of a BTC transaction are orders of magnitude expensive than the average bank fees on money transactions.

Oh, no, I meant that the other way around. As in, "what promotes GDP growth more—companies and individuals having more money from a [lack of] bank fees, or power grids having more spare capacity from a lack of miners consuming electricity"?

financials are easy to fix - tax plastic containers to the point where it's more cost effective to recycle and let the market do the rest.

replace tax with any other way of artificially increasing the financial cost of plastic if you don't like taxes.

I like Penn and Teller magic shows but that’s about as much as I trust them. They are entertainers with a very obvious political bias, which is usually one that encourages ignoring climate change. Their environmentalism episode was a total joke.

Somewhat related: Adam Ruins Everything: The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk

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