[jurassicfoxy]

Recyling plastic has died for me. I read an article (probably posted on HN) that convinced me the act of "recyling" dumps enough microplastics into the water stream that it's all better off in a landfill. Finally that was it for me. Maybe on the odd day I'll throw # 1 PETE into the recyling bin, else it's into the garbage bag for me. Now we must simply focus on buying less.

[DebtDeflation]

How much plastic ever got recycled in the first place? My understanding is it was always largely a charade where we mixed plastic in with stuff that made sense to recycle like aluminum cans and then sent it all to China where they would recycle the aluminum and burn/bury the plastic and we all just pretended everything got recycled. Eventually the recyclable:garbage ratio got so low that China said enough and refused to take it any more.

[KennyBlanken]

5-10%, from googling it.

Most recycling is bullshit. "Electronics recycling" ships it off to third world countries where people pull apart PCBs over diesel fires and whatnot, dumping stuff all over the ground.

Each country gets tired of their land being used as a toxic waste dump and their people being poisoned, so the recyclers work to find another country desperate for some sort of industry.

The only solution is to tax the electronics at sale to cover the cost of recycling it in the least hazardous way possible, with extra penalties for devices with a fixed lifetime (ie, non-replaceable batteries.)

[ssivark]

> recycling it in the least hazardous way possible

What even is the answer here, once an electronic device has reach end of life?

[ASalazarMX]

I'm late to the party, but I guess modulariry would be a plus. For example, CPUs don't grow in big leaps of capacity anymore, it would make sense to rediscover the practice of upgrading CPU, RAM, battery, storage, etc. instead of whole devices. This could put a significant dent in ewaste for bigger devices.

[TeMPOraL]

Landfills are awesome. Properly managed, they're pretty much the best way to deal with trash. But they're also not completely out of sight, so people desperately look for inferior alternatives.

[toomuchtodo]

Plasma gasification. It is fine we have decided we can only do so much to reduce the waste stream, that which remains can be fed into a system to render it inert and the syngas produced burned for energy in a responsible manner.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984

("This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are "syngas", which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.")

[fullspectrumdev]

I recall seeing a small documentary about some people living in a small island community who were using destructive distillation to convert the absolute fuckload of plastic waste washing up on their beaches into fuel for generators and such.

I’ll have to go find it again, it seemed like an interesting “local” solution to a genuinely hard problem (plastic waste).

[TeMPOraL]

Burning plastics is the simplest useful way to recycle them (plastics being mostly hydrocarbons in solid form), though it's also the least interesting. It's a kind of minimum - if you don't know how to better reuse the material, then treating it as fuel provides some amount of value. Now, when proposed recycling schemes start to look economically or energetically worse than burning it or just leaving it in landfills for future use - that's a really bad mark.

[zacmps]

Syngas can also be converted to other products through gas fermentation.

[mathgradthrow]

slag here referring to vitrified whatever?

[toomuchtodo]

Yes, inert solid matter byproducts of the process (plasma breaking apart the molecular bonds).

[mathgradthrow]

I'm not sure I would confidently describe the byproducts of fully randomized high energy chemistry as inert. Whats wrong with burial?

[titzer]

You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products.

Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree. But the thing about trash is, biosphere can't handle much of it. Chucking it into a high-tech hole lets you manage the decomposition, releasing contents over time in form and quantity that the biosphere can safely handle.

Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.

[SI_Rob]

> in a vast, global cooperative

I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.

But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."

The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.

And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.

It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.

[llamaimperative]

Nature is neither cruel nor kind. Those are human concepts applied to a system that just systems.

[SI_Rob]

this is a dualistic belief that regards humans operating on human concepts as being somehow a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from the "system that systems" - a system in which they themselves increasingly constitute a locally (and potentially, a universally) significant energetic routing circuit.

[llamaimperative]

No, it’s not dualistic at all. I have not and never do make the argument that humans are somehow “separate” from nature. I am making the argument that value judgments (like all concepts) occur in people’s heads and are not intrinsic characteristics of anything at all.

[titzer]

I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.

[smegger001]

>I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done.

Let me introduce you to the species named Felis Catus.

[SI_Rob]

An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that.

But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.

Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).

Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.

[Bjartr]

On the timescales of the biosphere (thousands of years) the vast majority of plastics will break down and hydrocarbons bound in them will be as bioavailable (probably moreso) than they were originally. And on the timescales evolution can operate on, something will figure out how to digest it if there's enough of it available for long enough.

Which has nothing to do with whether or not we should work to solve the harm plastic presents to humanity and existing ecosystems (we should)

[scotty79]

Biosphere chucked in a hole huge amounts of materials in the past. The hole is where our coal and oil come from. Chucking our solid carbon in a hole where it can wait for the species that considers it a treasure rather than a trash is pretty reasonable approach.

[shiroiushi]

I disagree. The biosphere doesn't recycle many things, and instead just buries them underground, much like humans do. Just look ores: all that stuff that humans are mining in the Earth's crust is material from ancient asteroids that struck the surface and got buried.

[titzer]

You're talking about the 0.0001% of things it doesn't recycle. But almost every single molecule of your body will be recycled in dozens of different ways by hundreds and thousands of hungry little mouths that specialize in recycling viable organic matter--even your bones. Effectively everything within ~10cm of the surface of the Earth is going to get recycled into usable matter for the biosphere, and even those things ~1m will slowly decay in rich soil. Soil is alive by the way. It's not dead dirt, but 50% by volume bacteria, fungus, and other micro-organisms. Sure, soil accumulates and packs down and sediments out, as evidenced by so many geologic layers, but that's the 0.0001% I was referring to--limestone, sandstone, peet, shale, oil--the leftover of the very active recycling system back that pumps matter back into the biosphere and extracts latent chemical energy from it. Think of it; a layer in the sedimentary record that represents 10,000 years might only be 1cm thick, globally. That's not much waste. And it roughly balances out from all the volcanic eruptions, asteroids, meteorites, and space dust the Earth sweeps up.

[TeMPOraL]

Indeed. Also, in line with SI_Rob's parallel comment here[0], it's worth pondering what does it bury those ores under. Answer: it's bodies. Piles and piles and piles of dead bodies, covering the resources or even becoming them (e.g. limestone). Hell, the soil - the most important, life-giving resource we need to survive - is itself made of rock mixed with lots of dead bodies.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40744826

[shiroiushi]

Sure, the soil and other things are literally made of the corpses of earlier lifeforms, but that still qualifies as "recycling". I'm just addressing the fact that not everything is actually "recycled" in this way, and is simply buried, similar to a human landfill, although for nature and asteroids, the stuff wasn't used by the biosphere in the first place so it isn't exactly "garbage" in the normal sense.

Stuff like lead (Pb), for instance, isn't useful to the biosphere as far as I know, and is actively harmful to lifeforms in fact. It came from asteroid impacts to my knowledge, and was buried in the ground before humans dug it up and extracted it from ore, yielding the lead pollution we have today.

[TeMPOraL]

I view stuff like lead less as something that biosphere couldn't figure out how to recycle yet, so it sequesters and buries it - but by the nature of how life works, if some random mutation would make lead useful as a building block (like many, many other elements are), the biosphere would happily suck all the lead back up and spread it.

The pattern I see here is that over time, the biosphere makes everything it finds useful diffuse, present everywhere in low concentrations; everything else, it sequesters and stashes in high concentration in few places. So not unlike what our industry is doing, just with different materials.

[lazide]

Uh, someone has clearly not spent much time in a swamp. Or around caliche/dry lake beds (especially when on that last stage of drying when everything starts to rot).

Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around.

If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature.

Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.

[llamaimperative]

Nature absolutely does not have an equivalent because nature (sans humans) does not produce the scale nor types of refuse that we do. Superficial similarities like “sometimes it smells bad too!” are complete red herrings.

[scotty79]

Oil wells literally pump out stuff from purely natural dinosaur landfill. Coal mines extract material from tree landfills that happily accumulated waste for millions of years.

Give us a million years or two and we'll figure out what to do with plastic as well. Either we are gonna do it or some other species.

[llamaimperative]

Wait so which of those dead organisms that decompose were like plastic? Answer: None.

Interesting pattern in this thread of anti-alarmists thinking they’re privy to some special knowledge but actually it’s stuff everyone learns in like 5th grade (btw it wasn’t literal dinosaurs, but whatever).

[lazide]

Or you just have no idea what you’re talking about, because you live in a nice cushy region.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria] - kills over half a million people a year.

[https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https:/...

[https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-diseas...]

[https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...] ground water arsenic levels, nice maps start on page 5.

[https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-re...]

All are driven by these factors, and there are many many more.

And that isn’t even factoring in things like natural ground water Arsenic and Uranium contamination which poisons millions in many areas.

Near as I can tell, you’re just living in areas that are the equivalent of ‘the good side of the tracks’.

If you think Nature works at smaller scales than man, you’ve never spent time in Nature.

Can we make things worse? Sure! But there are also plenty of real, large scale, natural hazards out there.

[llamaimperative]

I don’t know what or who you think you’re arguing against, but it ain’t me.

First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!”

Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!”

Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.

[pixl97]

Until the thing you're still using as a product gets ate by this vast global cooperative.

[timcobb]

Yeah, a really popularly underappreciated thing, quite unfortunate.

[r00fus]

What we started doing is a) ordering out from restaurants less b) saving those plastic takeout boxes and reusing them for leftovers when we do go visit (we keep them in our car trunk) c) bringing our own reusable utensils for those restaurants that still serve plastic utensils (fast food usually) - easy to wipe down & wash.

Not an exhaustive list but a good start for ideas on how to reduce without hampering your lifestyle too much.

[bunderbunder]

We've also switched back to only ordering takeout from places that use more sustainable takeout containers. Those plastic dishes are reusable, but our need for them is not great enough to justify accumulating more than a few. And as soon as you surpass your need, they instantly flip from being reusable containers to being just about the most wasteful form of disposable food packaging imaginable.

Compare with what takeout was like in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was accepted that only some restaurants and cuisines were appropriate for delivery and takeout. Pizza boxes, deli paper and cardboard clamshell boxes are biodegradeable and industrially compostable. Foiled paper like McDonald's would use has to go to the landfill, but at least there's arguably nothing horrible in it. Oyster pails like Chinese takeout restaurants used to use is probably plastic lined, but plastic lined paper is at least a lot less plastic than the plastic dishes.

[infecto]

The issue today with most of those sustainable takeout containers is they are lined with PFAS.

Not true for everything but the vast majority are.

[r00fus]

Looks like this will be changing for the better soon: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-indu...

Even plastic-backed paper (ie, not PFAS) is much better than a fully plastic container, so I support his.

[bunderbunder]

True.

Consumer Reports did some testing on this, writeup here: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/dan...

It's from a couple years ago now, so individual results might be out of date.

[everdrive]

This is true, and because of this we eat out as little as possible. People just won't given up convenience, no matter the cost to health.

[arresin]

Reusing plastic increases the pthalate exposure. Especially cheap, anonymous plastic. It is better in a landfill.

[wazoox]

You may be talking about this one?

https://quillette.com/2024/06/17/recycling-plastic-is-a-dang...

[meristohm]

Same here. We focus on reducing our consumption of plastic, reusing some (rectangular tofu bins are useful holders for screws, for one), and trashing the rest.

[brnt]

Let's say you eat tofu or something tofu-equivalent daily. That means you need to reuse one rectangular tofu bin daily. And that's a severe underestimate of the actual amount of plastic one generates in the course of a regular day, but let's say it's just the one box. And let's say you toss it every other day.

You still have 183 of those boxes after year 1. I don't know about your toolbox situation, but I will have run out of screws, nails, bits, bobs well before then to store.

It's a nice idea, and I do it too occasionally, but the size of the waste stream is just orders of magnitude more than one could reasonably reuse.

Somebody keeps inserting all that crap in between the things I really want, and it is time they are can't quite so cheaply do so.

[downWidOutaFite]

Sorry but individual action by the most conscientious people is not going to make a dent. We need collective action and that means laws and treaties.