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A comment on Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012. Parent comment

Re:Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012 by thingie on Monday November 29, 2010 @12:11PM (#1950976)
Indeed. It's mostly an article about Warsaw getting some new subway cars[1], which isn't particularly interesting vehicle (well, it is, but they are so much same for anyone outside the engineering/railfan world), so they had to come up with some catchy headline… Most subway cars in the world are "recyclable" in the same manner (and perhaps even efficiency). I don't see anything very special here, it seems to be just a modern lightweight subway car, made mostly from aluminium.

[1] Not interesting enough to make it to HN, IMHO.

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Re:Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012 by hugh3 on Monday November 29, 2010 @12:37PM (#1951056)
Probably one step back. Without knowing precisely how the bidding system goes for Polish subway cars, I'm going to guess that there were multiple competing bids for building new subway cars. They were all about the same, except one of them said "Lookee, our cars will be recyclable!"

The critical reader might, at this point, say "Hey wait a minute, subway cars are made almost entirely of metal and metal is always recyclable, so you're really not saying much of importance there". However, it suits everyone just fine to pretend it's a significantly greener option, from the company to the politicians to the media outlets who publish their press releases, so here we are.

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Re:Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012 by thingie on Monday November 29, 2010 @01:01PM (#1951125)
No, it doesn't work this way, bidders compete on criteria that are part of the bid announcement, like price, local jobs and offsets, technical parameters and so on (oh, sure, corruption too, sometimes, but that's another story). This sound overly paranoid and pessimistic.
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