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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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

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.

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.

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

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