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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

That's not correct, plenty of countries don't have space for landfill and instead burn off trash in incinerators.

Let’s talk about the US then. Do you agree we’re not running out of land? If so, what is the point of recycling?

For plastic and glass, to make you feel better. Even if you're concerned about land use, they end up throwing away a lot of what goes into the recycling anyway. With glass especially, it is actually worse for the enviroment to reuse the glass because of the energy and water use associated with cleaning it. (There's also an argument to be made that we should continue to recycle plastic so the public is in the habit of sorting their trash if we ever come up with a way to do it efficiently)

For aluminum, recycling is incredibly important. It reduces the need for environmentally-destructive aluminum mining and energy intensive smelting.

For paper, recycling high quality paper like clean office paper and some cardboard reduces the demand for virgin wood pulp. Lower quality paper gets thrown away.

Also, shout-out to composting - food and yard scraps breaking down in a well aerated environment produces fewer greenhouse gasses than landfills.

It is amazing how much stuff you can compost. In my armchair quarterback opinion compost everything you can and recycle only metal.

If people are pissed about how much stuff they are throwing into the trash... go look at the incredible amount of packaging material that gets thrown out....

How many people have backyards to compost stuff and the time to do it? 25%?

Backyard composting piles aren't really the solution in my opinion (they're great if you can do them, but few people ever will). We need municipal compost pickup.

My city actually has this - we were all given bright green compost bins and instructions for composting. The amazing thing about municipal composting is that they can handle way more types of food scraps (e.g. bones and fruit pits) than backyard composting bins. They come pick it up every week just like the trash and recycling.

Unfortunately, it seems like I'm one of two or three people on my street who compost my food scraps every week. I think composting should really be easier for people to figure out than recycling - it's so simple to know what you should and should not compost (as it says on the front of every green bin, "If it grows, it goes").

Presumably you hope the US has a long and prosperous future beyond our generation, so it's a problem that will need to be solved at some point. The US consumes 70 million plastic water bottles a day, just disposable water bottles. Consider all other plastic waste, and consider that just because there is uninhabited land doesn't mean you can economically put rubbish in it.

I must admit I am surprised that anyone needs to justify the merits of recycling, so I'm curious what your outlook is. What makes you question the need for recycling?

There is enough landfill space effectively forever. It's really not a problem.

> What makes you question the need for recycling?

The environment makes me question it. Everything I've seen shows recycling anything except metal is bad for the environment. We only do it because it makes people "feel good".

The right thing to do with:

Metal: recycle it

Glass: bury it

Paper: bury it

Plastic: burn it

Everything else: bury it

If you look at the free market for recyclable materials, you will find that clean paper and especially clean cardboard are valuable feedstocks for paper/board processing, and should definitely be recycled.

You can compost food waste paper like paper towels, cardboard takeout boxes, etc... compost makes a lot of sense.

Why not turn organic waste into charcoal/carbon and bury that? It would be considered CO2 sequestration.

Why is glass recycling bad for the environment?

Because transporting it (it's heavy) and recycling it consumes more resources than making it fresh.

Additionally glass is harmless in the environment, and it's not something we can ever run out of.

So why do it?

Additionally, if you actually do want to recycle things, glass shards contaminate everything, making it much more difficult and expensive (i.e. consumes more resources) to do it.

What you're describing is mostly a failure of US commingled recycling system. Meanwhile most of EU countries successfully recycle about 90% of collected glass, collected in glass-only containers.

Making new glass can be an issue, as it typically uses sand, which is not very renewable and sand mining in many countries causes massive issues with flooding, droughts, sinking, black markets, even sand mafia!

No we should not landfill everything after a single use, or we will soon run out of reasonably accessible raw materials in suitable forms.

That's sand for concrete and beaches you are talking about. Sand for glass is not in short supply.

And no, we will never run out of it - the planet is made of it.

What is your point? If we are not running out of land should we start dumping plastic all over the place?

Modern landfill techniques are actually quite scientific and regulated. It's not as bad as the far left portrays. We do need to encourage more reusable things though. Plastic and aluminum can be almost 100% recycled. Plastic is much much lower. It will take more than one solution to fix the problem. I think composting is a pipe dream though unless someone figures out how to quickly do it on a very large scale. It's fine for home gardeners but the rest of us simply aren't going to do it.

Composting is only a pipe-dream for plastic because so few councils have a plastics composting process in place. No one was ever expected to compost PLA at home, and it's definitely just a feel-good exercise right now. Most PLA cups end up in landfill because they can't go to the normal recylcing plants.

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