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Comment by throwaway3627 | Hacker News Reader

There's problems and solutions that need policy and political will to implement:

- consumer-sorted recycling is a BandAid virtue-signal and ineffective because it gets mixed up, under-sorted and contaminated

- post-consumer waste-stream separation works. Stanford does it because five bins was ridiculous

- all trash should be recycled, composted at-scale to reach near zero landfill stream

- Structural waste reduction by source-return reuse, recycling

- single-use plastics should be eliminated

- plastics that cannot be recycled should be banned from retail sale, packaging, products and landfills

Maybe very large taxes on landfill waste would compel recycling and manufacturing to get their acts together?

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Single-use plastics are perfectly fine if:

1) You already have oil-powered power plants, and

2) You have efficient, modern trash incinerators that can recover 90%+ of the energy in plastics, and

3) You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.

Because the utility you get out of making plastics out of oil, using the plastics for something, and then burning it, is higher than just straight up burning the oil.

But if you fail any of these three points, you're better off banning single-use plastics.

Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3.

I believe Japan follows this system. It was very confusing when I visited because they sort their waste into combustible and non-combustible, instead of trash vs. recycle.

I know that many places have modern incinerators, but that's only 1 of 3. If it was in the US, I'd expect that actually sorting trash effectively would be a big problem, despite having a modern incinerator.

Sweden incinerates 97% of all its non-recyclable trash, obviously has modern incinerators, and has some oil-powered power plants for peak load purposes.

"Can you point out anywhere that's made all of 1..3 work successfully? I'd think that most places have 0 of the 3."

Zurich has a very centrally located incinerator (behind the "viadukt" shopping area) and I believe that they generate electricity from the plant. They also have a very granular sorting regime ... it would appear they are covering all three of the bases.

> You make sure that all plastic garbage actually ends up incinerated.

Oddly, this seems to be the most difficult part of the equation here in NYC. Containerization needs to be adopted in order to make the system more efficient and sanitary. Containerization would prevent refuse from spilling into the street, into the storm drains, etc. The current system (curbside pickup of plastic bags) falls over (literally and figuratively) in too many ways and the sanitation workers aren't interested in picking up the slack -- they ignore anything not secured in a plastic bag.

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