Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikewilliams | Hacker News Reader

Recycling will never be profitable, but we can't just keep burying trash and forgetting about it, or maybe we can, I don't know.

View on HN

I don't know about never. The price of a product is related to its scarcity. At a certain point, there will be recyclable materials we are almost out of. At that point, I can see recycling becoming very profitable.

I can see a time when we mine garbage dumps for materials.

I think about this a lot too. Plastic is extremely energy-dense. The landfills of today could easily be the fuel mines if the future. And yes, it will be full of contaminants, but coal is tainted with heavy metals and radioactive materials.

Anyway, recycling has always been a resource drain to make people feel good. It's definitely better to recapture and contain as much waste as possible, but people don't think about things like how much water is wasted by rinsing all those bottles out.

What matters is what is being recycled. Some recycling makes economic sense today—metals for example and car batteries. The recycling of some plastics makes sense, but it has to be sorted.

There is plenty of land for landfills, but for recycling there may always be things that makes sense to recycle and things that just don’t pencil out.

Or perhaps we could just stop creating it in the first place. Is there really a need for all of the one use plastics or the excessive packaging ?

That's the "reduce" part. But just how does one roll back packaging practices? I can't imagine how that would work.

Maybe the German model. But in the US? It seems unlikely.

What is the German model? I don’t recall there being a massive difference in packaging there except for the reusable (deposit required) soda bottles.

Extreme source separation. And laws that impose waste-management costs on manufacturers. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411646 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19411250

Thanks. Will take a look at those.

My city Bangalore effectively enforced a plastic ban. So some grocery stores now only have paper bags even to pack veggies. I think it's doable. The government enforced the ban as there was no alternative, we don't have enough space for landfills.

A city like Singapore however uses a lot of plastic and thermocol. I wonder where they find space for their landfills. Probably they are doing the same, exporting all the trash to China or Indonesia.

China still accepts rare-earth/metal trash, but also properly sorted trash too. For example, recently mainland declined to accept Hong Kong trash until they implement sorting. On these conditions, they can continue sending their garbage to the mainland China.

What's missing from the "profitability" equation are all the costs that are pushed elsewhere:

- polluted water so we're all injesting micro plastics - polluted air as the manufacturing is a mess - increased energy consumption to manufacture "perfect" looking packaging.

These all have real, hard, cash driven consequences that aren't factored into the normal profitability equation.

Make sure to tell your local scrap yard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com