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A comment on Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling. Parent comment

Re:Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling by jeffbax on Saturday August 04, 2018 @10:21AM (#17686949)
I'm not sure its that simple, presumably part of the subsidy is that we want less physical mass/waste going into landfill so there's an argument to making recycling artificially cheap vs. making new stuff.

While I am hopeful that at some point the market will come up with solutions to recycle material from landfill, I think plastic and carbon taxes still would have a place today (doing something about fishing nets would sure go a long way though…) specifically to help reduce the material burden (or nudge drinks to go back to more aluminum cans)

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Re:Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling by SamReidHughes on Saturday August 04, 2018 @11:14AM (#17687136)
It isn't intrinsically good to reduce the physical mass of landfill. Recycling is useful if it reduces the cost of manufacturing stuff plus the cost of putting trash in landfill. "Cost" means the amount of human work, minus externalities.
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