This 100x over. I had a very eye-opening experience as an american living in Mexico for 2 years, while trying to recycle as much as possible. I learned a lot and continue to think about recycling in this context, since it applies globally. Once you're out from under the umbrella of "The Great Recycling Con":
- Recycling companies in Mexico will not accept any material that they can't make a profit on. Only a few numbers of plastic are recyclable/profitable.
- Recycling companies in Mexico enforce sorting and cleanliness before receiving any material. I clean everything, even run it in the dishwasher if there's space. Pizza cardboard is straight out.
- Glass is the hardest the recycle. There's a global glut of used glass. This goes against the normal idea that it's the easiest to recycle because it can be simply melted down. On the other hand, some beverage companies wash and reuse returned bottles. Those are the only bottled beverages I buy now. Buy a case, pay a small deposit, then continuously swap it for full bottles.
- Aluminum is the easiest to recycle and the most profitable. I've switched to buying as much as possible in cans. Especially switching from drinking beer out of bottles because it "tastes better" to buying it in cans and pouring it in a glass.
- Clean cardboard (and paper to a lesser extent) is fairly easy to recycle.
- Companies pay you a small amount for material. It's not a lot but it covers the cost of dropping it off.
These basic economic rules apply in the United States too but it's masked by the con described in this op-ed, temporary recycling subsidies and "wish-cycling" [0]
> switching from drinking beer out of bottles because it "tastes better"
FWIW, that was never true, anyway. It's just that, once upon a time, cheap beer came in cans and expensive beer came in bottles, so it was hard for consumers to make a decent comparison.
When I was in beer judging class, we did an interesting blind taste test among various beers that are available in both bottles and cans. The cans consistently won. It didn't take too long to notice the pattern, either: At least for beers with a more delicate flavor, the bottled version tends to have a certain subtle hint of soggy cardboard that's absent in the canned version.
In the test you described, I presume the beer has been poured into a glass, like the OP states they now do. If you skip this step, drinking out of a can can have a distinctly metallic taste (imagine that), which is why I -- and I imagine many others -- tend to think beer tastes better out of a bottle than a can.
> At least for beers with a more delicate flavor, the bottled version tends to have a certain subtle hint of soggy cardboard that's absent in the canned version.
Canning is generally considered to be a better packaging method for beverages when it comes to flavor preservation, as opposed to bottling. Bottles allow light in, which leads to unwanted flavors developing in the beverage.
You can't frost a can of beer but you can frost a glass of beer and it absolutely tastes better and has an effect on enjoyability. But for what its worth, why is it harmful to put glass in the landfill? Glass is made from silica. It's non toxic.
I think the real wastefulness of glass probably comes from its manufacture and use much more than its disposal. It takes a lot of energy to make - compared to aluminum, the melting point is very high and you need a relatively large mass of it to make a container. And its extra weight also means that you'll burn a lot more oil in shipping products in glass containers.
A lot of that could be mitigated by finding products that are bottled locally in reusable bottles. I don't know about other countries, but that's become all but illegal in many US jurisdictions.
re: frosting, it really depends on how how you like your beer. If it's an American pale lager like Miller or Budweiser, where the defining feature of the style is that it's meant to have as little flavor as possible, yeah, a frosted glass will help with that. As will a bottle, since bottles are perfect for minimizing your nose's exposure to what you're drinking. If it's an ale that's meant to have a lot of complex flavor and aroma, and you like those things, cellar temperature will bring them out more.
The melting point notion is throwing you off -- manufacturing new aluminum requires way more energy than glass. The reason people will pay you to recycle aluminum is because of the huge differential in (electricity) cost between making new aluminum vs. recycling aluminum. The energy differential between making new steel vs recycling steel is about 2:1. For aluminum, it's 20:1. This is because making aluminum involves first melting bauxite ore, then running a shit-ton of current through it to perform electrolysis.
Yes, there's a very minuscule amount of plastic lining the inside of most aluminum and steel cans. It's vaporized or becomes slag when the metal is melted in a furnace.
It sure does seem that glass could be put to use. Ignoring food-safe containers and windows, there are still many things that could use it.
Consider bricks, both traditional and in the style of the typical concrete block. These could be glass. There are many options for making them: full melt, sintered, or as aggregate cemented with something else.
Floor tiles ought to work. The result need not be transparent; other ingredients would stop that.
Fiber glass insulation seems like a reasonable use.
Fresh water is a rather precious commodity and running a dishwasher just to dispose of stuff uses even more power (even the soaps used are generally not particularly friendly for the environment). A better idea is a 5-gallon bucket of rainwater and an old bottle brush. Recyclables need only have the large dirt removed rather than being germ-free like a dishwasher is designed for.
I knew I would get called out because I wasn't clear enough. I run the dishwasher about once a week. If there's space in the top for greasy plastic that's going to be recycled I throw it in. The point is, recycling companies just trash everything that isn't clean.
>running a dishwasher just to dispose of stuff uses even more power
A dishwasher is more efficient than hand washing under normal circumstances (not an ancient dishwasher, not pre-washing dishes, more than one plate to wash, etc).[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
A dishwasher in the normal cycle uses about as much water as an efficient person uses in washing a single large pot without the tap running (reusing this water for washing all dishes is the most efficient way to hand wash)
In addition, a dishwasher has high pressure pumps, a centrifugal grinder, and its own water heater (to heat hotter and more localized than a central water heater, above sanitizing levels)
The assumptions here are wrong because they are based on creating sanitary dishes suitable for human foodstuffs. Recyclables don't need to be sanitary -- just free of large amounts of dirt.
* You don't need rinse water, so the total water needed is at least halved. Since the water is just sitting in a bucket, you can do many, many washings with the same water which increases that efficiency even more.
* You don't need heated water as sanitation and complete cleanliness is unimportant. Heating the water alone uses more energy than everything else put together.
* You don't need particularly clean water, just clean enough to prevent large dirt from adhering. As such you could use floor-cleaning chemicals that clump the dirt and precipitate it to the bottom increasing use time. Reusing water and the chemicals in that water for longer has a very large impact on the environment.
* a couple strokes with a bottle brush take way less energy than a high-pressure pump and once again, get the item clean enough.
* Fewer things going through your dishwasher increases its lifespan and decreases the total cost of operation. This is also better for the environment
I doubt such laws have EVER seen their day in court vs an individual collecting a few gallons of water for personal use. That would seem to clearly violate constitutional rights to life and liberty.
The only case where they might have any weight would be widespread collection of water to the extent that it had a measurable impact on the community, but this would involve large quantities of water and would almost certainly involve business interests rather than personal ones.
Here's contact info for 20 water rights lawyers serving my hometown of Las Vegas, NV [1]. To be blunt, you are underestimating the complexities of water rights law.
Aside from aluminum, I really doubt it’s worth all the effort to recycle, especially because most people can’t be trusted to sort and clean properly, and most facilities won’t make a profit paying for the labor to do it.
Reducing consumption is the only answer, and further down is reusing. But recycling is so inefficient, I assume it has mostly been for political points, and conveniently, we had tons of containers going back empty to China.
When I was a Boy Scout, I probably hauled and schlepped 3 imperial tons of newspaper for recycling before San Jose implemented their first program with those diamond-patterned yellow, olive and green recycling plastic crates (about 48" x 36" x 24" / 1.5m x 1m x 0.75m).
> The recycling of everything else is mostly a combination of virtue signaling and a jobs program.
The truthiness of this statement depends a lot on the region of the world you are looking at.
In Europe there is a consolidated and expanding recycling market for many different types of materials. For example more that 30% in eight of the plastics sent to recycle in EU actually ends up being recycled [1]. (It would be closer to ~40% if it weren't for France.) These are big numbers that are having a meaningful impact on the amount of CO2 produced, not just "jobs programs".
BTW, a decade ago I met the owner of a factory that used only post-consumer plastic and he stated that his business was limited by the lack of good post-consumer plastics: the biggest share of the best kinds of plastics are being bought, at an higher price, by incinerators operators, leaving his factory and others to deal with second-rate plastic.
I love the pfand system we have in the Netherlands and Germany. I read that about 90% of the bottles and containers are returned because there is an immediate financial incentive to do so.
In Asia, plastic bags are given for free, and I'm sure charging a few cents would have made a massive difference. Uber Eats, GoFood, and Grab Food all have made some changes so you can mark if you do not want the plastic cutlery. There is a company in India, Zomato, that even sends recyclable bags along the food. All of these changes should be appreciated by both media and consumers.
Recycling would never solve the problem alone. It's an illusion of a solution. Using less and less plastic and more alternative material would.
I love the pfand system we have in the Netherlands and Germany. I read that about 90% of the bottles and containers are returned because there is an immediate financial incentive to do so.
Add to that: Even if you can't be bothered to return a bottle for the Pfand you can just dump it in a visible place and it will be picked up in minutes and returned by somebody who needs the money more urgently than you.
What important is that the materials get recycled not that they get returned. Returning only addresses the eyesore of discarded packaging not environmental concerns.
It's even better than recycled, most bottle are simply cleaned and reused as is. You can tell because the side of beer bottles in germany are scratched on the top/bottom where they contact the other bottles during transport: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/55df3cede4b0daf4d...
Glass bottles get reused, plastic gets recycled. The first PET bottles were made to be reused as well, they were quite a bit more substantial than the current versions. This scheme was scrapped quite soon, probably because it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles and discard the ones which for some reason were not usable any more. This led to the development of the current one-time-use thin-walled PET bottle.
As to whether those wear marks on glass beer bottles are from them touching together during transport I'd suggest that this actually is not the case. They shouldn't come into contact with another, seeing as they are transported in crates with pockets for individual bottles. It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other. If you're from Germany you might have watched 'die Sendung mit der Maus' ('the program with the mouse', a long-running television program aimed at children which amongst others details all sorts of industrial processes) where this process is followed from start to finish. Here's an example from the '70s:
> This led to the development of the current one-time-use thin-walled PET bottle.
I'm drinking from thick reusable/reused plastic bottle everyday here in Berlin, even coke is sold in them, they still exists
> it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles
Which is a shame because what we save in $s now will cost us much more than $s in the future.
> It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other.
Could be, either way it's a sign they are indeed reused. Thanks for the link.
There's a fast Italian fodd chain in London called Coco di Mama that found a creative solution: they offer macaroni tubes as a straw alternative. Far less unpleasant than paper straws.
Why would incinerator operators be purchasing high quality plastic? I don't get it.
edit Why are incinerators purchasing stuff to burn at all? That should have been my first question. What is the profit in purchasing stuff to burn? Is this a energy production source or something?
Dioxins are generally the biggest emission concerns and they are prevented by higher temperature burns. Plastic is also likely higher in energy density which could potentially both make it more economical than a given baseline unsorted garbage depending and serve to keep the temperatures high. Although ironically not being /very hot/ when burning organic matter risks dioxin formation between about 200 and 600C.
They want only the plastics, and not the water, rotting food, literal shit, construction waste, etc. that ends up mixed into the cheaper waste streams.
On the other hand aluminum recycles very well, and it is economically viable to recycle, unlike almost every other material. It's estimated 75% of the aluminum ever produced is still in circulation, thanks to recycling.
The solution is clear: use aluminum instead of plastic for packaging. Possibly cardboard.
Wish there were better ways to recycle. I find myself using re-usable glass/plastic containers for storing food instead of single-use ziplock bags. I like to see companies ditching plastic straws, lids, and cups. The other day I was in a tea shop in Columbus OH and the store gave me a plastic cup with a paper straw. It's like they gave effort but didn't really think the whole thing through since they still gave me plastic in the form of a cup..... I suppose its progress... meh.
The straw stuff is supposed to be about the size of the straw and their propensity to get into the environment and hurt animals. Cups don’t have the same effect.
(That said, my understanding is the straw research is based on a 5th grade science project and most of the straws that reach the environment are from third world countries that don’t have good landfills or waste disposal systems...)
I wash them, as long as they haven't held something that could be an issue. For example, this morning I used the last muffin in a freezer bag. As part of the morning washing up I did that bag, and it will take an hour or so to dry, and then I'll use it for muffins again.
There is one form of "recycling" which goes undermentioned - trash to steam.
It "solves" sorting logistical issues nicely and any actually worthwhile recyclables can be removed still. Granted care must still be taken for handling emissions and it is more a "supplemental generation for disposing" than any significant generation. I wonder if I am missing anything about it aside from "landfills may be cheaper".
I try to recycle metal (especially aluminum) and glass. The recycling of everything else is mostly a combination of virtue signaling and a jobs program.
Also, the waste caused by commuting in a 5 passenger vehicle by oneself every day, and living in a spacious home in a suburb and all the extra consumption simply living in a low density environment probably offsets all the recycling in a lifetime. Even funnier to think about all the separate recycling trucks driving around all the extra distances due to everyone having quarter acre lots.
You forgot to subtract the human suffering inflicted onto introverted personalities being forced to live in high-density urban housing as well as the cost of a much higher infectious disease transmission rate, increased crime (more humans in close proximity = more conflict), and/or higher cost of building materials suitable for high-density human living and spaces or the cost of human lives when the low-bid contract builds said housing and it collapses.
Seriously, every time I read a comment like this it's like Dr. Strangelove has walked off of Kubrick's set and into real life.
I remember when I was a kid and we used paper bags and almost everything came in glass bottles. I think we as a society need to start making plastic a less attractive option.
I was really disappointed when Austin, TX, in response to banning thin plastic grocery bags, instead switched to using thicker "reusable" plastic bags, when we could have just made paper bags the standard
Up in MA (about boston) they now have to charge for bags. 10cents in cambridge, 5 cents in Boston and a bunch of surrounding towns do the same. Its been a couple years and you seem to see a lot fewer of them as trash. (We had one that got blown up into a tree near where I live..)
After some initial griping I've gotten used to it. Its not a lot of money, but it makes you more conscious of it (Because "do you need a bag" = $).
Fascinating that the article most cited by the "recycling is a con by silly hippies, just use disposable plastic and landfill it" crowd as well as this "recycling is a con by evil big business, just stop buying stuff" article are both from the New York Times.
I personally am part of the "we should charge corporations who generate the refuse for disposal, clean up and recycling as well as carbon in production, and let the market and human ingenuity then sort it out via a whole range of specific interventions that match the needs of each sector" team.
That solution will almost certainly involve a whole bunch of recycling, plus other things like making things easier to recycle, using more recycled material, but apparently both the hippies and the libertarians think recycling is a scam for entirely opposite reasons and so it's hard to have a nuanced cost-based discussion about this, at least in the US.
In Europe they generally track the stats on how much is being recycled and continuously aim to improve that, tweaking things as they go.
Or maybe a way to quickly tell a product's total environmental impact over its life cycle including post usage? Maybe even have that information available as an comparable index so you can easily compare similar products? Here in Sweden, many grocery stores display the product price per measurement unit, making it easier to understand, for example, how much your pasta is costing per kg across different brands.
You can certainly get an estimate but the exact impact depends upon information that doesn't exist yet and metrics will easily be misread even without any active deception or conscious metric gaming.
Say consumers either treating cheap reusables as disposables or reusing nominal disposables woule throw it out of wack and even accurate accounting could have perverse impacts.
Not to mention that there is also a difference in environmental impact of the same resource consumption that differs by location - brewing using great lakes water vs a depleting aquifer. Or power usage in aluminum from solar or geothermal vs burning coal to do it.
If you take a look at this online Swedish grocery store where I searched for pasta [0], you can see the price for each product but also the cost per kg ("jmf pris"):
- Recycling companies in Mexico will not accept any material that they can't make a profit on. Only a few numbers of plastic are recyclable/profitable.
- Recycling companies in Mexico enforce sorting and cleanliness before receiving any material. I clean everything, even run it in the dishwasher if there's space. Pizza cardboard is straight out.
- Glass is the hardest the recycle. There's a global glut of used glass. This goes against the normal idea that it's the easiest to recycle because it can be simply melted down. On the other hand, some beverage companies wash and reuse returned bottles. Those are the only bottled beverages I buy now. Buy a case, pay a small deposit, then continuously swap it for full bottles.
- Aluminum is the easiest to recycle and the most profitable. I've switched to buying as much as possible in cans. Especially switching from drinking beer out of bottles because it "tastes better" to buying it in cans and pouring it in a glass.
- Clean cardboard (and paper to a lesser extent) is fairly easy to recycle.
- Companies pay you a small amount for material. It's not a lot but it covers the cost of dropping it off.
These basic economic rules apply in the United States too but it's masked by the con described in this op-ed, temporary recycling subsidies and "wish-cycling" [0]
[0] https://recyclecoach.com/residents/blog/help-put-a-stop-to-w...