HN Reader

Recycling is such a sham. I wish we as a nation (US) would come to terms that most products are not economical to recycle. It could actually move the needle on consumption when you know that’s it’s going to be thrown away. About the only thing worth recycling in the US is metal. The rest including glass are just junk. Most folks don’t realize that glass they throw in their recycling is often going to the landfill because they live too far away from a glass manufacturer for it to be economical to use.

I don’t say this as someone who is suggesting we not think about consumption but rather it’s a fake feeling that it’s going somewhere other than the landfill. I would be curious in other countries how economical it really is to recycle.my favorite is Japan where some areas will incinerate certain qualities of plastic for energy. I think that is a useful way to reuse it.

They're very strict about sorting your own recycling, organic waste, and household waste here in Zurich. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. And also there are newspaper articles with the format of reporting on someone receiving a fine and how thankful they are now that they know the proper way to recycle (obviously planted - I had to write an article like this in junior high because I used the school phone to call 911 to ask the time).

What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. I mean, even with these strict rules they still need to sort the stuff that people didn't sort properly in the first place. So why not sort it all? (Except for the biowaste because that could contaminate the recycling)

Plastic recycling is worse than useless: due to the filtration needs it's one of the larger contributors towards microplastics in the water supply. This is on top of all the other factors: any recycle-able plastics go in for another 1-2 rounds at most, and given the pace of plastic usage it means the recycling did not accomplish anything. Further, most plastic cannot be recycled, some 3rd party countries just dump it into the ocean, others just ship it to a landfill.

Just adding to the conversation: I can strongly recommend the documentary The Story Of Plastic to get an insight on recycling in general.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. I used to be big on trying to reduce my plastic usage, but I gave up on it because the more I got aware of how f*'d up it all is, the more guilty and depressed I started to feel. It felt like fighting a hydra.

I've witnessed it myself: a lot of the waste that gets recycled by the consumer gets thrown on the same pile and goes in the same incinerator. It's not economically feasable to properly recycle plastics. It's all bs greenwashing.

I just stopped caring at some point and became a little more pessimistic about humanity. Sad really.

I've always assumed we'll end up re-processing landfills when it hits an economic tipping point: better tech emerges, raw sources are exhausted, etc.

There's a story in Junkyard Planet of this exact thing making someone wealthy when a product that was treated as waste became valuable to the steel industry, and they knew where to find it in the dump.

It would to interesting to compare the "virtuous" reasons offered in these comments for hating recycling with USA vs EU (or other high Vs low recycling areas, like countries or states).

Does the USA or Missisippi have the lower recycling rate because they are uniquely immune to the corporate oil lobby that scammed Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium?

Is it because they instead reduce their consumption and reuse their empty containers unlike the lazy Belgians who are too addicted to feeling virtuous? Has the EU plastic use risen more than in America, because of recycling?

Ah, the myth of recycling.

I wonder what the next recycling movement will be? Discarded EV batteries? Dead solar panels?

How does this next iteration play out?

The recycling fantasy and forever increasing plastic production go hand in hand together.

This is a marketing press release about two industries that are not particularly trustworthy in their claims. I would not out any stock in any assertion made within.

Using expensive and wasteful AI to pretend plastic recycling is meaningful... this is marketing nonsense.