It's strict here in Switzerland and from what I've heard similarly in Japan. There really isn't much that can actually be recycled - PET can be but other plastics are incinerated to produce electricity so they have to be sorted. Newspaper can be recycled but pretty much no other paper can be so it gets incinerated also. Cardboard can be recycled. And we have to recycle glass and metal. If you do it wrong you may be fined.
My cousin lives in Japan and says buying pringles is a pain because you have to tear the "can" apart into its separate components - metal, paper, and plastic all in one container.
> We have plenty of space to put them – less than 0.01 percent of the US is used for landfill, less than 0.001 percent of Australia is, and only about 0.02 percent of Germany is.
Not all space is equally viable. Landfills need to be close enough to populated areas to make waste transportation feasible, while far enough from populated areas to avoid being a blight.
So, sure, you can build a landfill in the very center of the Australian outback, but who's going to use it?
The authors think reusing a cotton bag for 173 times is difficult - that's all we need to say about this article. When recommendation for landfilling comes from this kind of sources, I think we can safely assume we are doing absolutely great with our demands to reuse, repair and recycle!
If I bought one cotton bag and used it for my whole life, the argument would seem silly.
In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.
The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.
Not just that, but they go as far as claiming that single-use Solo cups are more environmentally than using a mug. Literally anything made cheap and quick and with little energy is better by their calculus. Doesn't pass the sniff test, IMO.
Not to mention the microplastics. Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.
Very few people are using a bag to the expected life cycle limit, and even fewer are doing it without WASHING, which is key in doing full LCA (life cycle analysis).
Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.
As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).
I bet you're right. Why though? I've gotten thousands of uses out of mine. Even if you shop infrequently that just means they'll wear out more slowly, so surely that's viable for everyone else, maybe with a 7yr break-even point for an every-2-week shopper?
Based on my own usage patterns i'd get really roughly that number before they fell apart. The trader joes "burlap" style bag I like would get me about 1 trip a week for about 3 years. It is, notably, plastic lined though.
I bought 4 quite large heavy duty canvas bags in like 2005 and have been grocery shopping with them since then. I almost never buy more than will fit in those (actually, most trips I just take two of them).
Plastic, when used properly, significantly reduces food waste. It's a trade-off curve. Like most trade-offs, optimal is likely somewhere in the middle rather than on either extreme.
I’ve encountered this same inability to think or count when people claim that the lifecycle emissions of solar panels or batteries wipe out any potential emissions savings from use. It’s easy to confuse people with big numbers!
Proper recycling improves national security and the well-being of their citizens.
Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.
Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
That's fine if said trash actually ends up in the landfill. When it ends up ont the grass next to the parking lot is when you start to get the idea that we're all living in each others filth.
Also I disagree that energy should be the item to minimize. It makes sense if you are burning stuff for it, but we've known how to get free energy from the sky for quite a while.
If solar energy is free, or close enough not to matter, it's odd that the quote I got for installing it for my house is tens of thousands of dollars. Or that about 700M people don't have electricity, or that 2B people cook with wood, charcoal, dung, etc. But I can see why, if you believe that energy is free, you would have an entirely different view of global and local economics.
I don't want another landfill. Ours is almost full and they're talking about converting a beautiful valley into the next one. And it's way father out of town. Shipping trash ain't free.
There's a balance between safety, cost, and energy use that should be struck. "Just landfill" doesn't seem to be chasing that balance.
A question I've often wondered: is the "cost" of bad recycling higher or lower than the cost of not recycling?
We've moved a few times over the years and it's often surprising what is and isn't recyclable in different jurisdictions. This means I often find myself putting something into the recycle that isn't recyclable in my current jurisdiction.
Is this worse than just not recycling, let's say on a per unit basis? I.e. is one unit of recyclable material in the landfill more or less bad than one unit of trash in the recycling pipeline?
Not sure there's an answer, but it's a question I've pondered often.
This was pointed out to me a while ago, but it seems to hold true:
Whether someone appreciates a modern engineered landfill is a useful Shibboleth for distinguishing real evidence-based environmentalism from narcissistic signaling "environmentalism."
I'm one of those folks who appreciate a well-engineered landfill. We had a great one in Nevada County, CA. Now that I've moved back to Texas, I've learned the difference the hard way, although not as hard as the people who lost their homes.[1]
Engineering is about _tradeoffs_. By reducing a complex objective down to a single metric -- in this case, the author chooses energy expenditure -- you can arrive at a great many number of asinine conclusions, such as, single use plastic bags and solo cups are better for the environment...
I have a cotton bag in my car. I've been using it for 20 years. It was used 173 times probably in the first 3 years. I have a ceramic coffee mug on my desk. It's moved with me through multiple jobs over the last 25 years. It's been used tens of thousands of times. Some goods are naturally disposable like a Kleenex, but much more could be reusable. The math is right there.
My cousin lives in Japan and says buying pringles is a pain because you have to tear the "can" apart into its separate components - metal, paper, and plastic all in one container.
Not all space is equally viable. Landfills need to be close enough to populated areas to make waste transportation feasible, while far enough from populated areas to avoid being a blight.
So, sure, you can build a landfill in the very center of the Australian outback, but who's going to use it?
In reality, a household can easily gain 5-10 new tote bags a year as businesses hand them out as swag or with legitimate collections of items or paperwork. There's no way to use them all enough to justify their manufacturing.
The point the article is making is that the "use fewer plastic bags" thing was well-intended, but it incentivized an alternative with too many tradeoffs. Businesses could order a ton of bags, and feel like they were being "environmentally friendly" by handing them out. But in reality, they just flooded the marketplace with so many bags that didn't need to be made in the first place.
Washing and cleaning are surprisingly inefficient and costly (in terms of $, energy, resources, and emissions) compared to manufacturing, and many assumptions about recycling and reuse go out the window once the realistic numbers descrbing how people actually behave replace idealistic assumptions that go into a manufacturers internal emissions calculations.
As someone who loves to use cotton everything- it pretty much never makes sense to use from an LCA perspective (and that's OK).
Or do they sometimes have a part of the stitching failing that takes 2 minutes to repair with a needle and a cotton thread?
I visited some places that package nearly all their vegetables and fruits in 1 use plastic containers, this is bonkers.
If plastic is so efficient, why wouldn’t we make reusable bags out of it instead of cotton? Why is the argument to waste it?
We aren’t getting more oil.
Plastic is a good mechanism for carbon sequestration. Pull some carbon from the air and use it to make something both useful and permanent.
Good example is South Korea. They were devastated after continual war in the 1950s. So they implemented mandatory recycling. Food waste goings into bin A, metals into bin B, plastics into bin C, ... This allows for reducing the cost of recycling by presorting items. It helped them rebuild and become stronger. To this day they still properly separate their garbage to ease recycling.
Recycling food waste and scraps means creating a nutrient rich fertilize resource. Tossing them into a land fill removes nutrients from the food chain. USA food has less nutrients than years past because of the push for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
Also I disagree that energy should be the item to minimize. It makes sense if you are burning stuff for it, but we've known how to get free energy from the sky for quite a while.
There's a balance between safety, cost, and energy use that should be struck. "Just landfill" doesn't seem to be chasing that balance.
We've moved a few times over the years and it's often surprising what is and isn't recyclable in different jurisdictions. This means I often find myself putting something into the recycle that isn't recyclable in my current jurisdiction.
Is this worse than just not recycling, let's say on a per unit basis? I.e. is one unit of recyclable material in the landfill more or less bad than one unit of trash in the recycling pipeline?
Not sure there's an answer, but it's a question I've pondered often.
Whether someone appreciates a modern engineered landfill is a useful Shibboleth for distinguishing real evidence-based environmentalism from narcissistic signaling "environmentalism."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44
1. https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/officials-say-stinky-fir...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law