South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste

Re:South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste by darkpuma on Saturday April 13, 2019 @01:25PM (#19654404)

> " It isn't profitable because fossil fuels are artificially cheap "

Not that cheap. In the aforementioned metal recycling example, the energy is typically coming from fossil fuels too; refining aluminum from ore takes an insane amount of electrical power. Even if you do that with renewable energy, that's still that much power that can't be used for other things that must be supplied by another power source (e.g. fossil fuels.)

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Re:South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste by azernik on Saturday April 13, 2019 @02:35PM (#19654851)

That just indicates that metal recycling is super advantageous, to be profitable even with the abnormally low price of energy.

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Re:South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste by Scoundreller on Sunday April 14, 2019 @01:13AM (#19657718)

A lot of natural gas is stranded or considered a waste product of oil production.

So fertilizer plants in those areas suck up that cheap CH4 to reform it into H2 and heat up the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia and then into more transportable fertilizers like urea.

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Re:South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste by emj on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @05:04AM (#19672173)

You place aluminium plants where the energy is cheap e.g. Iceland, it is often cheap because it's hard to export energy.

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