Recycling: Another look

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by gturner, Oct 4, 2015.

  1. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    John Tierny writes again reprising his 1996 New York Times magazine article that set a record for hate male.

    A sample:

    Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.

    They probably don’t know, for instance, that to reduce carbon emissions, you’ll accomplish a lot more by sorting paper and aluminum cans than by worrying about yogurt containers and half-eaten slices of pizza. Most people also assume that recycling plastic bottles must be doing lots for the planet. They’ve been encouraged by the Environmental Protection Agency, which assures the public that recycling plastic results in less carbon being released into the atmosphere.

    But how much difference does it make? Here’s some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.

    Even those statistics might be misleading. New York and other cities instruct people to rinse the bottles before putting them in the recycling bin, but the E.P.A.’s life-cycle calculation doesn’t take that water into account. That single omission can make a big difference, according to Chris Goodall, the author of “How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.” Mr. Goodall calculates that if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.

    But the indoctrination has been extremely thorough.
  2. garamet

    garamet "The whole world is watching."

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  3. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    That's bad news. It means the Chinese will raise trillions of meal worms on contaminated Chinese plastic, and then they'll feed those meal worms to chickens, and they'll serve those chickens at KFC.
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  4. Bickendan

    Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

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    Good thing I don't eat at KFC :ramen:
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  5. Dinner

    Dinner 2012 & 2014 Master Prognosticator

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  6. NAHTMMM

    NAHTMMM Perpetually sondering

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    Usually I just slosh a bit of water around in the bottle, for like a pop or juice bottle. If it's something messier, like applesauce or jelly, I let used dishwater sit in there for a while.
  7. Ancalagon

    Ancalagon Scalawag Administrator Formerly Important

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    Yep, recycling thin plastic is mostly a feel good measure.

    Much more effective to just not produce them in the first place.

    Plastic bag bans are a good start. Then get to bottles (this will require some infrastructure upgrades, namely public water fountains).
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  8. Dan Leach

    Dan Leach Climbing Staff Member Moderator

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    Plastic is a blight on the world, especially the oceans.
    Using much less and recycling a lot more would be a good start.

    The amount of carbon saved is fairly irrelevant when you look at all the problems plastics cause.
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  9. garamet

    garamet "The whole world is watching."

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  10. RickDeckard

    RickDeckard Socialist

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    The best thing we can do for the environment is to leave the oil in the ground and to use alternatives.
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  11. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    My dad was an engineer at Alcoa, and he once told me that it costs more to recycle aluminum than to just produce it from scratch. That was probably upwards of 30 years ago, so the technology might have improved. :shrug:
  12. tafkats

    tafkats scream not working because space make deaf Moderator

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    That, and there's also the question of how long we can keep piling it up in landfills, so recycling ends up addressing two different issues.

    Of course, consumption is the bigger issue, but if you say that, the gturners in the world will start shrieking that you want to bring back Soviet-style bread lines.
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  13. We Are Borg

    We Are Borg Republican Democrat

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  14. Bickendan

    Bickendan Custom Title Administrator Faceless Mook Writer

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    So the next question is, and maybe it's answered in the actual episode since the clip you posted is cut off, what do we do about landfills? How do we avoid the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505?
  15. Captain X

    Captain X Responsible cookie control

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    It is, actually. Mostly by being pointed out as a non-issue. Made even moreso if the worms in garamet's article can actually do what the study says they can.
  16. Ancalagon

    Ancalagon Scalawag Administrator Formerly Important

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    Not quite. It simply says that at the time putting it in a landfill was cheaper. That's not an answer. Koko was cheap as hell.

    Also, the clip is 11 years old and using data that is even older (and even then it admits that some recycling was cost effective even back then [aluminum]). Since then the processes have gotten cheaper and more efficient, energy has gotten much cleaner and the known negative externalities of garbage disposal have grown.
    Last edited: Oct 6, 2015
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  17. Captain X

    Captain X Responsible cookie control

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    AFAIK, aluminum recycling is still the only cost effective type of recycling, partly because using old aluminum is actually part of the manufacturing process in making new aluminum. Probably the next best thing would be paper, but there you have the added process of washing the dyes and ink out of old paper before it can be re-pulped and made into new paper that you wouldn't have starting off with fresh wood. Plastic has the same problem. Can't really think of anything else that would be really cost effective as far as recycling it, other than other metals.
  18. Tererune

    Tererune Troll princess and Magical Girl

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    It seems to me that recycling becomes more effective when it becomes a profitable business. Newer recycling methods are going to be expensive and inconvenient until their efficiency is improved and their costs lowered. Alternatives to certain things have to be developed. For instance solar power is a good way of the future, but until it's efficiency grows and it's costs are lowered you jut simply are not going to have it taking up a huge share. The reality is those technologies advance when market prices for oil go up. When gasoline was around 4 dollars a gallon you saw a drop in big engine car sales, and a rise in the value of economy cars. You also saw a push for electric hybrids and alternative source. Now that gasoline has dropped again we see a shift back to pollution oriented trucks and SUVs and less need for gas economical cars.

    Also the delusion that a carbon imprint is the only measurement of pollution is fucked up and both sides know it. Yes, carbon emissions are a problem, and yes they do contribute to our pollution levels, but there are much worse industrial waste products out there. The volkswagon controversy shows that you really o not want to be ignoring nitrate pollution in the air or ground. focusing purely on carbon is not doing the whole job as we all found out when emissions were not tested for nitrate pollution in the air on the volkswagon turbo diesels which would have shown they were swapping carbon emissions for a worse yet untested for emission.

    Like always it seems the right wind only wants to address one thing and leave out everything else. Lowering carbon emissions should not be our only concern in pollution. Even climate change is not the biggest reason to lower emissions and not pollute through garbage piles. Having lived in florida near garbage mountains I do not rate recycling as a need because of emissions. I rate lower amounts of garbage as cleaning up where I live, and recycling or re-using materials that would end up in landfills is reason enough for me.
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  19. Tererune

    Tererune Troll princess and Magical Girl

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    What needs top happen is not just to find these things, but to develop a use for the byproduct and then industry will do the cleanup for us. look at how car recycling has advanced since the metals and other internal products became profitable to sell. Way back when the Japanese made a lot of their cars based off of recycled metals from the US junkyards. Instead of mining everywhere they used our waste to help compete with us. If there is a need for the waste it will be purchased and used.
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  20. Captain X

    Captain X Responsible cookie control

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    There's also the matter of the toxic nature of the materials used in producing solar panels, which makes it very environmentally unfriendly to construct and to dispose of them. :bergman:
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  21. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Recycling jewelry makes sense, even though it takes a lot of labor to pry the diamonds out of discarded wedding rings.
  22. mburtonk

    mburtonk mburtonkulous

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    How many solar panels are disposed of every year? If I were a major scrap dealer, I think I could sell those toxic materials back to solar panel producers for less than they cost to mine.

    It's a balance. :clyde:
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  23. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    No semiconductor firm would bother buying a scrapped solar panel because there's no way to recycle it. The arsenic, phosphorus, and other dopants are already mixed in with the silicon. There's no way to unmix them other than going through the whole manufacturing process from start to finish, but now removing materials that wouldn't have been in the quartz sand they'd normally use.
  24. gul

    gul Revolting Beer Drinker Administrator Formerly Important

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  25. tafkats

    tafkats scream not working because space make deaf Moderator

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    Ah, but ... librulz like recycling! Therefore it is our obligation to declare it bad! (Belch)
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  26. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    The environmental benefits of recycling come chiefly from reducing the need to manufacture new products — less mining, drilling, and logging. But that’s not so appealing to the workers in those industries and to the communities that have accepted the environmental trade-offs that come with those jobs.​

    It doesn't reduce jobs, it requires more jobs. That's because it's inefficient because old products have to be reprocessed into new products by sorting, melting, and recasting or washing, grinding, pulping, and all the rest. For example, recycled paper costs more than new paper. A print shop explains why

    At Anderberg Innovative Print Solutions, we often receive the question from our clients – “Why does recycled paper cost more than brand new (virgin) paper?”

    Here are a few facts to consider that may answer that question:

    Recycled paper has a more complex production process than brand new (virgin) paper, and those extra steps equate to more costs:
      • With brand new paper, there are only 3 steps in the production process: logging, milling and distribution
      • Producing recycled paper requires many more additional steps which include:
      • Used paper collection and recovery process: Sorting and preparation to remove adhesives or staples that may be attached to the paper which must be removed before it can be processed
      • Once that’s complete, recycled paper must then go through pulping, and then to a de-inking facility (as most printing inks are not water soluble) to remove the ink and prevent the finished product from looking 'dirty.
      • Finally, the de-inked pulp is ready to go to a mill to be made into recycled paper.
    These additional steps each involve costs, and explain why recycled paper is more expensive than brand new paper.​

    Increased costs mean more labor, more energy usage, or both.
  27. Captain X

    Captain X Responsible cookie control

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    You might as well have posted something from Fox News.

    Is the New York Times a conservative publication? Since when? :unsure:
  28. tafkats

    tafkats scream not working because space make deaf Moderator

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    John Tierney is not "the New York Times." He writes columns for the Times ... and, yes, he generally takes conservative positions on environmental issues.
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  29. gul

    gul Revolting Beer Drinker Administrator Formerly Important

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    Captain X probably buys the standard conservative line about the Times, and doesn't realize that it routinely publishes op/eds from conservative writers.
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  30. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Instead of questioning the sources, perhaps you should focus on their arguments. Recycling aluminum makes economic sense. Recycling burritos from a trash bin does not. How do you sterilize the ingredients? How do you mend a pair of half-eaten tortillas cheaper than mixing some masa and making a fresh one? This implies that each object needs to be looked at as to whether it makes sense to recycle it, and that look and the subsequent recycling process both cost money and resources, as does making each new product line with it's unique requirements and pick-up, processing, and re-distribution systems.

    Or more to the point, if it makes sense to recycle a product then you don't have to because homeless people will make a living doing it themselves, such as the can ranchers. If they're not digging through your garbage to separate paper from plastic, there's no money in it, and thus no savings.

    Going back to the paper issue, and whether it will fill up our landfills, so what if it does? Should we all wander though Appalachian forests raking up the leaves so they can be recycled into trees instead of becoming part of the ground? We could spread paper litter in the woods and it would have much the same fate as leaves. Are we going to run out of forest because trees shed their leaves in the winter? If it's unacceptable that bottles take a thousand years to degrade, then shouldn't we work to eliminate all granite and limestone which can pollute the environment for a billion years?