<story><title>Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans &apos;Foreign Waste&apos;</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2017/12/09/568797388/recycling-chaos-in-u-s-as-china-bans-foreign-waste</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>njarboe</author><text>Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly. The bottom can be clay sealed with leak monitoring to protect the ground water. With a little extra effort they can designed for methane capture to prevent problematic off gassing. Maybe aluminum and other purish metal scrap gets taken out of the waste stream and the rest goes back to the Earth. Some carbon capture happens and the site can be mined in the future if it seems worthwhile. Add video monitoring of what goes in for future prospectors to evaluate the ore body and call it a day.&lt;p&gt;Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsj_hn</author><text>There is a virtuous fervor to recycling -- it&amp;#x27;s a type of middle class moral purification ritual, something that counterbalances high levels of consumption, even when it wastes more scarce resources than putting trash in a landfill.&lt;p&gt;This is a great article:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;opinion&amp;#x2F;sunday&amp;#x2F;the-reign-of-recycling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;opinion&amp;#x2F;sunday&amp;#x2F;the-reign-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certainly recycling some things makes a lot of sense. For example, scrap metal.  But the push to recycle &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; has lead to exploding costs and mounting subsidies. For example, the article cites New York spending $300 million on subsidizing recycling, about half the park department budget, rather than what it would cost to put waste into landfills.&lt;p&gt;By lowering recycling costs, China has played the role of enabler, allowing many middle class households to continue to obtain consumption indulgences at below market rates. If China stops subsidizing this stuff, I hope there is some pushback from communities, or at least from most communities, because we&amp;#x27;ve gone full crazy on recycling.</text></comment>
<story><title>Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans &apos;Foreign Waste&apos;</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2017/12/09/568797388/recycling-chaos-in-u-s-as-china-bans-foreign-waste</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>njarboe</author><text>Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly. The bottom can be clay sealed with leak monitoring to protect the ground water. With a little extra effort they can designed for methane capture to prevent problematic off gassing. Maybe aluminum and other purish metal scrap gets taken out of the waste stream and the rest goes back to the Earth. Some carbon capture happens and the site can be mined in the future if it seems worthwhile. Add video monitoring of what goes in for future prospectors to evaluate the ore body and call it a day.&lt;p&gt;Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aloha</author><text>Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense. But Recycling itself is a good idea - we used to do this, AT&amp;amp;T did it with everything they made, milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more, but right now, those costs are still present, they&amp;#x27;re just being passed down to an unknown party, at an unknown point in the future.&lt;p&gt;We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.</text></comment>