Also, "mined by junkers" isn't a very sustainable approach. There are only so many junkers and that number is reducing as society standards increase and they have better ways of making a living than hauling bottles to recycling centers.

I think that the parent commenter meant Mining Companies when saying junkers. So large industrial mineral extraction operation from landfills and dumps, as opposed to 3rd world style picking through rubbish.

I'd imagine that a ton of landfill waste would be comparable to relatively rich ore, and that harvesting it is perhaps less destructive/invasive than opening a new mine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus#Later_li...

I mean, I get that you're not talking about food, but neither was Malthus per se. I just feel I might point out that the guy died in 1834, at the ripe old age of 68. We have still not run out of even one of the resources he predicted were going to run out "soon".

Likewise you could probably make similar predictions about life and nature itself 3.6 billion years ago ... and that too has not yet happened, and most agree (why the prediction is different for humans vs nature I don't understand ... nature replicates exponentially and far faster than humans and uses anything and everything easily available to it just like we accuse ourselves of. But somehow nature can do no wrong. Or perhaps the reasoning is that it will adapt ... and apparently we will not ?) that it's unlikely to happen in the next 9 or so billion years. Ironically, it is now suspected that life on this planet will die from crushing overabundance of energy rather than from a shortage of some critical resource.

In fact it seems that Say's law is correct, and this is not a serious point of contention among modern-day economists. It essentially says that one of two things is true: the price mechanism means that either we will simply never run out of a particular resource, or we will replace it, probably with something better and cheaper, and never run out of that. We have in fact run out of plenty of individual resources in the time since Malthus, so there have been plenty of test cases for Say's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law

Life has carried out Say's law almost to perfection. With only a few rare exceptions the concentration of atoms in cells, and therefore in most plants and animals is an almost perfect reflection of how they occur in the dead matter surrounding them. Why couldn't we do the same, given enough time, with our technology ? I mean, we don't know how at the moment, but we're getting closer all the time. I would even say that plastic is one such innovation: it is far closer in concentration to the natural environment than the mostly steel and various metals it replaced, far more abundant than the wood it replaced, and generally got us (a lot) closer to having our technology made up of the atoms surrounding us.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that there is no shortage of asteroids, some with literally mountains of rare earths, that we could either mine in orbit or, if small enough or cut up, crash into the Earth.

Finally, as animal bodies illustrate, it is perfectly possible to construct very advanced and well-working pieces of technology with zero access to rare earths. We just don't know how ... yet. We even know perfectly well how to get closer to that goal, it just isn't cheaper at this point in time.

I'm sorry, but all you're doing in reality (whether you realize it or not) is finding some vague resemblance of a justification for our irresponsible culture. I would either try to do something to address the problem or just avoid trying to keep up hopes like this. It only makes people feel better about not helping without actually solving anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not sure where you live but in my town I pay 7€ per bin container (approx 50l) for non-recyclable waste but the recyclable stuff is free (which is probably still too cheap)

The bus stop is that close because people live densely here. Which means that there are many people per building, who collectively decide what size of garbage container to get and pay for it. I'd have to persuade a majority of the other flat owners to do the same in order to save actual money, otherwise I'd just have to pay for the container I don't use.

There aren't very many homeless people, so that problem is small. It exists but it's small. As for poor people, the garbage container is effectively included in the rent (it's a separate line item, not a separate invoice) and is cheap compared to the other line items, so that problem doesn't really exist.

As far as the homeless, I'd much rather they use the bins than leave stuff lying around the street, even if I pay more in taxes. I definitely would prefer they would put the aluminium foil and lighters in the bin to the current approach of letting it pile up in any handy alcove.

This is not to say that consumers paying for their trash solves all problems.

It does, however, provide an incentive to avoid "bad" trash in the first place. "Taxing" manufacturers doesn't (because those taxes apply equally to every manufacturer)

EDIT: To be clear, taxing the manufacturer works via contributions of ecological people in facor of the unecological ones. It's the opposite of what you'd want.

There's no middle ground in America between bringing lunch from home every day so it's in reusable containers and throw away packaging for anything that's not immediately consumed on premises. I would gladly pay another dollar or two for someone to give me tiffin-style lunch packed in a reusable container.

That doesn't sound weird at all. Seems perfectly normal to me.

> but it's not like you can show up to a restaurant and say "here, use my tupperware for my to go order."

Have you ever tried it? You might be surprised, especially for a to go order. It works at coffee shops. If they don't want to do it they might throw some health-code BS at you and you can add it to your list of places to boycott, if you wish.

> There's no middle ground in America between bringing lunch from home every day so it's in reusable containers and throw away packaging for anything that's not immediately consumed on premises.

My office's lunch room also has plastic spoons and forks. On the rare occasion that I haven't been able to track down metal silverware I've washed and reused the plastic multiple times.

Actually I'm with them that there's no guarantee my tupperware has been properly sanitized, nor do I trust the general public to sanitize theirs when you have so many people who will gladly double dip into communal foods.

EDIT: The "health-code BS" bit is from my experience once, requesting a restaurant to refill my water bottle when I was leaving. Unless they're dipping a water hose into my bottle to fill it, thus bringing water in my bottle into contact with their hose, I fail to see the health issue.

I'm pretty sure I've heard they just can't deal with grease from food in the recycling. (Not that they don't try to address a bit of it, but that any significant amount ruins their batches or something.)

(1) Is it actually worth the water? Especially in somewhere with a water crisis, like (say) California?

(2) Can they actually wash these though? On a large scale, how could they possibly wash plastic wrappers that can cling to themselves so as to remove all the grease?