In terms of something like paper, you're likely right. There's a weird popular perception that when you go to the grocery store and get 4 paper bags, somewhere a logger fells a beautiful 1000-year-old sequoia to grind into paper pulp, when the reality is that the same managed forest land is replanted over and over with fast-growing trees and harvested and replanted as soon as they're ready. The more demand for paper, the more tree farms there will be, and i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees. If the paper ends up in a landfill, that's fine. It's not toxic.

Or we could use a ton of energy and chemicals to recycle paper (and also to clean it since all consumer recycling in the US is "mixed stream" meaning someone's used dirty yogurt container and beer bottles are all over the paper), and produce much worse paper.

But all "recycling" is too valuable to helping people feel good about consumption, for us to be honest with ourselves about how pointless most of it is besides aluminum and glass, and maybe steel.

That’s not the panacea you make it out to be. Tree monocultures significantly impact the environment, wreck the soil, harm biodiversity, increase forest vulnerabilities…

> i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees

This does not have the effect on atmospheric CO2 that you implying, unless the resulting paper is deeply buried - not incinerated, or left to rot, or biodegraded in any way.

> The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.

It doesn't capture all of the costs. Key term here is "externalities", which are things that should be priced into a transaction, but currently aren't. Like the environmental impact of manufacturing process.

If all major externalities were priced in, and recycling would still be more expensive, then we could confidently say that it's the wrong thing to do.

Your way of thinking definitely isn't entirely incorrect, and I think a lot of times people forget that prices, while they can certainly have an arbitrary component, are largely driven by market forces, which at the very least will tell you something about the supply and demand of a product. However, I disagree with this:

> And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources

I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:

Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.

>However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.

How does this apply to recycling though? Landfills in developed countries have little, if any externalities, because they're engineered to contain waste.

https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/9/3/the-hidden-engin...

Largely I agree - landfills are not nearly as bad as people assume based on aesthetics and history. In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration. I just disagree with the logic of "If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing". There's many situations where prices do not correlate with environmental impact. In the case of recycling, I haven't done the research to be certain either way. I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.

> I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.

That's the same thing I've seen demonstrated. It's really too bad that the plastics industry seized on the opportunity to greenwash wasteful amounts of plastic packaging by giving people a recycling bin that claims to do something useful with that discarded plastic, when in reality it's rare for post-consumer plastic to make any rational sense (other than those things like we're discussing, where people in practice waste even more resources in the recycling process just to feel good that the plastic material itself was technically not 'wasted').

>In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration.

Only if it doesn't offgas. Or leech.

They are engineered to contain solid waste, but often pollute the air and water, because the externality is cheaper than containing that waste.

“Costs” often ignore externalities like environmental damage and inequality. Landfilling or dumping plastic may be cheaper now, but it shifts the true cost — centuries of pollution —onto vulnerable communities today. There is a reason the clothing dumps are in Ghana and Chile, rather than wealthier nations like the US or Germany.

If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.

The reason the clothing dumps exist is greenwashing. If we weren't pretending that reusing clothing is meaningful to the environment, we'd just burn the clothing locally.

Why don't the greenwashers greenwash burning clothes locally?

You'd think that cotton could be upcycled - the Soviet Union notably upcycled cotton, by turning it into the duraplast (made of compressed heated old cotton and plastic resin) that made up the body panels of their Trabant cars.

Of course, the Soviet Union doing something doesn't automatically mean it's economical or sensible, but at least in premise it should be useful for something.

Most of the toothbrushes we've owned in our lives still exist. What is the cost of having them around still? I don't know, but I know it wasn't factored in at all when we bought them.

Really it depends where they end up. If you drop them on the street, that incurs a greater cost than landfill, which probably is less economic than incineration (plastic contains a lot of energy).

Honest question (no agenda): How does burning plastic interact with the environment in terms of producing pollution and/or CO2, I guess compared with putting it in a landfill?

I'm fine with stipulations like using some kind of (economically-viable) filter on the resulting smoke.

All that I "know" about it is only based on vibes so that's why I'm asking.

I do know PVC can produce dioxin if the combustion isn't exactly right. Definitely there are some pitfalls with incinerating plastic! They could in theory capture the CO2 but nobody seems to do that. Probably not economical. It's basically an alternative to burning fossil fuel, still not great for the environment but at least you're not digging it up and it's disposed of. Recycling works okay for some plastics e.g PET.

Plastic is made from fossil fuels. You are digging it up. It's not an alternative, it's just a longer way around.

Taking a bunch of waste plastic and burning it does not cause a proportional increase in oil/gas extraction. The partial derivative is going to be pretty low.

Huh? It's already extracted. Burning it causes a precisely proportional increase in the amount of fossil carbon that ends up in the atmosphere. It is exactly the same environmentally as burning gasoline, except even dirtier.

Better to bury it. Put it back in the ground, where it came from.

I can't stop my wife from cleaning everything we put in recycling. Not just a rinse-off, but completely and immaculately cleaning them. Sometimes in the dishwasher. I think the net environmental benefit of our recycling may be below zero.

I couldn't convince my mom to stop washing the recyclables. Fortunately, just recently, our municipal sanitation department recently published informational video on proper recycling procedures, in which they explicitly tell people to stop wasting water on cleaning the trash.

I always clean ours, with the water left over after I have cleaned the dishes. As far as I can see it has zero environmental issues and means the bin doesn't smell.

The price rarely captures all the costs.

If stealing from a factory and selling their products makes you more money than owning the factory and making the product, then doesn't it mean that stealing is the right thing?

The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.