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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

To add to what others have said, I think that a lot of people have this idea that "trash = bad" so deeply internalized that they're heavily biased toward only putting things in the bin when there can be no doubt whatsoever that it is garbage.

You also see this when people put greasy paper take-out food containers in the recycling. No, it's not recyclable, and worse, it might further contaminate other things and render them non-recyclable as well. But, when I ask houseguests not to put them in our recycle bin, they seem to be honestly startled by the request. Oftentimes they assume it's because I'm a lax recycler and would rather throw things away than sully my pristine recycle bin with uneaten curry.

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Yep, I asked people to do the same recently at a party. They were entirely shocked. It's like realizing that your disposable cutlery and plates are actually waste and seeing it going into the actual trash makes them realize how wasteful it is. Recycle (or charity giving of clothes) is such a "guilt free" behaviour, feeling like you do something good for no efforts, so I'm not surprised people would do it even when it makes no sense.

Depressingly that was the point of recycling in the US

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Penn & Teller said it in 2004: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/

> You also see this when people put greasy paper take-out food containers in the recycling. No, it's not recyclable, and worse, it might further contaminate other things and render them non-recyclable as well. But, when I ask houseguests not to put them in our recycle bin, they seem to be honestly startled by the request. Oftentimes they assume it's because I'm a lax recycler and would rather throw things away than sully my pristine recycle bin with uneaten curry.

It happens here because recycling volume is unlimited, while regular trash has a fairly low limit.

However.

You do not have to sort the recycling. They do not reject it for being entirely take-out containers. And it's collected in open-top containers that result in a mass littering event every time trash day happens to be windy.

I suspect they're just picking out the metal and putting everything else in the landfill, anyway.

Plastic recycling is a sham.

We were paying China to take it, and they were putting it in a landfill (probably). China won't take our trash, I mean recycling anymore, so now we're putting it in landfills.

General rule of thumb is if you can get money for scrapping it, it's recyclable (aluminum, glass, steel, etc).

Companies use plastic because it's cheap and the government won't regulate it. I remember when sodas used to come in bottles, and food came in wax paper wrapping, and it tasted better.

From an npr article posted by someone else:

>Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Glass is mostly "recycled" by crushing, mostly to reduce the hazard of broken glass littering the street. In many states, buying a drink in a glass container carries a nominal extra fee to cover the "recycling." No one actually wants to buy your used glass containers for their own sake.

As recently as the early 90s there were still grocery stores that'd take back glass soda bottles to refill them, but the only places I know that still do anything like that are some fancy dairies (via the grocery stores that distribute their product).

Yeah, and I remember beer in iron cans... and that's about as relevant to the majority of consumers.

Sure, it's just that not that long ago, it was economically feasible, so it's not like it's some kind of unattainable fantasy. A couple laws, and a 5-10% hike on the costs of drinks distributed in bottles (thanks to the added costs of handling & recycling glass), and we'd be back there. It's something we definitely could do.

But yes, right now the main glass recycler in our area just crushes everything up and turns it into fiber glass. Only an irrelevantly-small fraction of bottles are re-used. I expect we'll switch to some kind of plant-based plastics before we bring back glass recycling for drink containers, though I wouldn't wholly rule out the possibility of a shift back to glass.

Another challenge with bringing back reusable glass bottles is that that approach belonged to an era with more local brands and a smaller variety of products. There were a few brands of soft drink that were all being mixed and bottled at local distributors, and cities had their own breweries that mostly only distributed locally.

Now that we have enough different brands of soda and beer to cover three sides of a convenience store, all made and packaged at one location and then shipped across the continent, I don't know that glass can be considered a less wasteful option. It's not just about the actual piece of packaging, it's also about how much diesel fuel is being burned in shipping such heavy packaging over long distances.

Reusable glass bottles also mean that you either bring the exact bottle to the exact retailer to get refilled with the exact product, or brands lose the ability to use the container for advertising and brand identity.

Even the frou-frou dairies that let you bring in their reusable bottles only want you to bring back their reusable bottles with their stenciled logos on them.

In the UK there is (still, in some places) milk delivery to the doorstep in 1 pint bottles. These are all a standard size, and they're all branded by the dairy. But interestingly the dairies are perfectly happy to use another company's bottles if they end up with them - branding be damned.

When I lived in a place with only one delivering dairy, this was quite rare. In Liverpool, I'd say that 10% of the bottles I get are 'foreign'.

In the US, I quickly accumulate 3-4 Stanpac glass bottles that are almost entirely identical, except for the indelible sintered labeling, and then I get behind on taking the right one to the right store and throw them out.

Which is something that could be solved by regulation mandating standard bottle shapes. Environment is more important than "brand identity".

Glass return schemes basically require standardized bottles. That's how it works in part in Germany: there's a small number of standard shapes of beer bottles, breweries get their share of bottles from return locations around them where possible. It breaks down with more and more breweries using custom bottles, which do need to be sorted out and returned separately, over large distances.

Cheaper is often because something was easier to make. Less materials and less energy.

That's certainly the case on a one plastic bottle to one glass bottle ratio, but I wonder just how energy efficient is making that bottle over the glass one? Twice? Ten times? A hundred? Then how many times will a glass bottle get reused on average? What sort of resources are used in the process of bringing them back and cleaning them?

This might be my bias as an Australian, tons of space but already having our natural wonder smashed by climate change, but I'm very uninterested in 'pro environment' moves that results in trading higher emissions for less land fill.

Although potentially an argument could be made that because ocean waste is less contained and more harmful than landfill, a 5-10% hike on plastic bottle drinks in low water polluting countries and using it to subsidise glass bottle drinks in high water polluting countries would be worthwhile.

I'd expect there are lots of factors with glass. Making a new plastic bottle every time might be cheaper on a resource-use than making a glass bottle and washing it for re-use (which uses energy, and water) some average number of times before it gets broken (5? 20? 50? No clue). But it might not.

However, other factors include: labor; transportation & waste costs (glass is heavier and breaks easier); and labor-geographic efficiency enabled by lower transport costs—for example, you might choose fewer bottling plants farther apart for cost efficiency, so you can reduce overhead and concentrate your labor costs in cheap locations, rather than every town having a small bottling plant, or stores having fill-n-cap stations directly in them, or whatever.

[EDIT] that is, with lower transportation costs of plastic you might be able to concentrate production in places with cheaper labor.

Its a popular misconception that recycling and climate change are in opposition. Landfills are the biggest producers of greenhouse gasses after electricity generation, transport and agriculture.

The reduced carbon impact is one of the reasons to recycle, but your not the first person on HN that I've seen claim exactly the opposite.

(Of note, burning the trash and using the energy produced is also better for climate change than landfill).

Is it the plastic in landfills causing the greenhouse gases?

Probably mostly rotting food and other organic matter, maybe some fridges and other chemicals. But once you start recycling one thing, it makes it easier to recycle others as they share infrastructure.

But recycling plastic specifically uses less energy which in turn saves carbon.

Even burning the plastic as fuel is regularly cited by life cycle analyses as less carbon intensive than landfilling it and creating totally new plastic to replace it.

In many countries still do this, especially with things like milk and beer bottles.

In the UK 70% of a typical green glass wine bottle will be recycled material and the limiting factor is the availability of the recycled material, the manufacturers would use more if they could get it, since it saves energy to do so.

And we generally don't offer deposits. When we did, the bottles were actually re-used directly.

When recycled, it is crushed, that creates something called "cullet" which can be used in the glassmaking process and is easier to transport. But I don't see the link to keeping broken glass of the street, that should be possible without crushing or recycling.

If they are, then that's still better than the alternative.

Some nations just burn their trash, with energy recovery, and then extract any metals from the ashes. Again still notably better than landfilling in a modern, well designed landfill, which in turn is better than unregulated landfills which are better than open burning.

The media seem to love "shocking" people with stories about how recycling might not be 100% perfect. Is it still a useful thing that all sensibly run countries do a continually increasing amount of. Yes, even the US where it continues to be a weirdly political topic along with climate change and evolution for no obvious reason and so there's no real federal support for it.

Recycling education is awful in America. I made it about 33 years without hearing that take out containers, etc. can’t be recycled.

It also recently came out that much of the recyclable recycling was and/or is not being recycled anyway, so I doubt any education would have made a difference. I assume all the recycling efforts are simply for political purposes at this point.

It recently got coverage in popular media -- but those familiar with sanitation operations and secondhand materials markets know that recycling has been subject to market demands for those materials for its entire existence. Recycling has never operated outside of the realm of economics.

The reasons changes to recycling programs are slow are:

1. People don't pay attention anyway

2. If the price of plastics go way up 5 years from now, you'll never retrain people to recycle again

3. Recycled metals are still valuable

the problem is the recycling triangle that's imprinted on the containers, the one's showing the material code on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_codes. Somewhere along the line the recycle triangle had become synonymous with recyclable, but what didn't get communicated is that only certain codes paired with that triangle are actually recyclable.

So they use the recycling logo to indicate the material, NOT that it's recyclable. I wonder which genius came up with this idea...

I think that's a doomed plan. It varies from city to city, and even over time based on what they can contract to unload.

They try to relay changes, but the messaging is incredibly spotty. At one point they were saying "plastic containers where the mouth is wider than the base" or something like that, rather than even trying to use the plastic codes.

Some can, if you wash them. Puts a damper in the easy disposal that folks are accustomed to, though.

Plainly dirty, obviously goes in the trash.

But where then is the line for what's otherwise clearly marked with the recycling symbol? ...especially when there's lingering suspicion the recycling bin contents are ultimately ending up in the landfill with the rest of it all?

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