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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Ha. "Let's break all these cups and throw em in a hole! Future people will use something something something tech and put them back together good as new."

People are constantly assuming magical future entropy-undoers to justify their breaking and ruining things today.

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I had a family member who used to educate people on recycling. Growing up it was a major fact that styrofoam was a forever material that would never biodegrade and couldn't be recycled. Today there are methods to recycle styrofoam (albeit just like all recycling it takes people and resources to take the effort to do it, which is the real barrier). I don't think being reckless with our future is a good idea. But history is full of past norms being changed by new scientific discoveries.

I've read that McDonald's phase out of its styrofoam containers in 1990 ironically prevented the recycling of a lot of styrofoam. Businesses were in the process of setting up to recycle styrofoam but the removal of such a huge source of used styrofoam eliminated their potential profitability.

Yes, they replaced food packaging that was recyclable with paper-based packaging that is not recyclable. I worked there before the transition, occasionaly we'd get an irate customer complaining about the styrofoam and we'd try to explain that it was more recyclable than using paper but most would refuse to hear it.

That said, at the store I worked at, the only things that actually got recycled were the cardboard boxes from the stockroom, and the oil from the fryers. Everything else went into the dumpster.

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