I grew up in a normal german household on the 'countryside'.

I alwasy recycled. Never thought about it much and my family is not 'alternative or whatever'.

3 Years ago i see a documentation telling me, that dark plastic can't be recycled and gets burned. Thin plastic can't be recycled and will be burned.

We have a system called 'green point' which basically means that the producer has to pay a little bit of money for the packaging they produced so that other company in germany takes it, its called the yellow bin.

So you have your black bin for garbage and you have a yellow bin for the green point which are 99% plastic (pringles has that sign on it as well). I thought, they would have a high recycling rate. Nope 40% of that already recyclematerial is recycled. 60% is just burned.

I could have thrown this shit away uncleaned, unseperated in my normal garbage bin for years and you know what? Everyone around me is doing exactly that.

Don't get me wrong, i will not become a pig, i will still put my plastic into that and sort and clean and recycle but wtf...

Burning is better for the environment than landfill. It's getting less good comparitavely as grids become carbon free via renewables, but especially for district heating its probably going to be a good thing for a while. Half recycled and half used to avoid burning coal seems a pretty good deal, especially if its paid for by the producers. So why the big overreaction?

We are not landfilling that stuff we are burning it.

And it doesn't matter thats not the issue. The issue is, that plastic is used every single day and its not reused/recycled it gets burned. This not sustainable at all.

the 'big overreaction' comes from the fact, that the weather is changing due to co2 emissions and we are far far away from any sustainable setup while already seeing the impact it has.

Its the 3th year of a draught in germany. Where i never encountered a drought. It is a green country and the trees around me have damages from the drought. When they are dying of, a tree which was growing for 30-40 years will be gone.

The co2 reduction of corona was around 8% and we would need to have 7% every year to combat climate change. 8% was doable with a lot of inconvienience. It doesn't give me a lot of hope when we are not able to recycle fucking plastic.

There's no chance that buring is better than a landfill. There's so much empty (useless) surface area on earth. Burning puts poison into the air and requires a ton of energy.

At least here we do have high requirements for burning stuff so you do have proper filters etc.

At the end of the day you probably have concentrated toxins after the burning but handling this shit is probably easier and cheaper than undoing a landfill in 30 years.

Burning generates energy.

To be fair, 40% is better than 0%

True; So how does that make it any better?

I agree with your sarcasm

> If it made sense the free market would already do it!

The free market only takes actions if there is economical incentives to do so. For the environment, it's difficult to achieve with the current process, which is why we can't trust the market to naturally adopt eco-friendly solution.

Hum... I do not disagree exactly, but, there is simply no rush to fix landfill.

There's a rush to fix climate change, species extinctions and habitat losses, environment pollution and a huge number of problems.

Landfill can easily wait for a century or two. So why take focus from the hanging problems and place into it?

> There's a rush to fix climate change, species extinctions and habitat losses, environment pollution and a huge number of problems.

> Landfill can easily wait for a century or two. So why take focus from the hanging problems and place into it?

Because the universal solution to almost all the problems you mentioned is to drastically cut consumption. It's amazing how many resources get wasted on stuff no one needs (i.e. that has to be advertised so that people buy it).

Coronavirus has proven the amount of unnecessary crap (especially in clothing) is way too high, in fact so high it's dangerous for our economies if a couple of weeks of lockdown lead to yet-unknown levels of economic collapse.

We as societies should radically rethink how we want to live if we want to live on this planet in two hundred years in peace.

> Because the universal solution to almost all the problems you mentioned is to drastically cut consumption.

Yet the thread is about recycling.

Efficiency (in consumption too) is a real valuable goal to work towards. And way more relevant than recycling. So, go on, you have a good problem to solve.

"Recycling" is just eye candy when it comes to plastics. For paper, glass and metal it works, but for plastics? It's way cheaper to just make new plastics. And there's no research that promises effective plastics recycling.

Because any serious comparison of recycling and landfill has reduced carbon emmisions as one of the benefits of recycling (and similarly burning for heat/power, which is still better than landfill on most grids today).

So, if climate chamge is an issue you care about, then recycling is one of the fixes and landfill and its methane production and waste of useful materials is one of the causes.

But since we live in a world where even the existence of climate change is a political hot potato, I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see one of the fixes attacked with well funded lies as well.

> Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me.

Same here. Especially as someone from central europe where most recycling just works and noone even thinks twice about it. Heck, a lot of landfill dumping is even banned here already and anything dumped must be thermally threated first anyway.

Actually, I'm not sure how well recycling works in "Central Europe". In Czechia, at least, although waste sorting seems to work fairly well, as far as I'm aware, the share of plastic waste that gets recycled is negligible. Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.

> Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.

Well, at least it doesn't get shipped around the world to then be dumped into the ocean...

Yes, 1 or 2 years ago I saw a short piece about recycling plastics and what really is getting recycled in the end. Many products which would be easy to recycle didn't get recycled because they had fancy labels on them which made it hard or impossible for the machines which resulted in the plastics getting burned instead.

I think it's like this because topic is difficult and everyone is guilty so there is attempt to marginalize it and just think "I did my part, I placed bottle in correct container". This part is easy and there is the problem - it's too easy and not enough to make a real difference.

Problem with waste stems also from wild consumptionism - for example: most phones, notebooks, displays produced nowadays are perfectly fine to last and be usable 5 years and more, cars - 20 years and more, but I doubt that majority of hn visitors are using their devices this long.

Recently I read here comment from someone who is using his Samsung phone for 10 years! I'm seriously admiring his dedication - it is hard to fight off desire, urge and social pressure to buy a new shiny toy.

Another topic is poverty and incredible amount of waste thrown into the rivers and oceans in some parts of Africa and Asia- when people are poor and they don't have sufficient living conditions then they don't care, waste management and environment is the last thing they think of. I remember how it was in 90s in central europe and how it changed over course of time.

The biggest environmental issue about plastics is that it gets into the ocean and kills wildlife and gets into our food supply, but recycling doesn't fix that. So whats wrong with just burying it in ground where it will eventually turn into its original form after a million years? Last thing we should be doing is shipping our trash to other countries where there is a chance it is just disposed of in improper way and ends up in the ocean.

Recycling paper doesn't even make sense. Bury it in the ground, we should be increasing paper usage to encourage more tree farms which are great for wildlife. It also is literally capturing carbon and burying it.

Burying plastic puts all the leachate into groundwater, where some will end up in the water supply.

If it was a concrete problem with a concrete end goal it could be solved with that good 'ol problem-solving ethos.

But the desirable end goal isn't at all clear. For example it's possible recycling many classes of materials should simply be abandoned all together, so we can instead focus on the source.

Bury it until it makes sense to mine it