This author does what other pro-industry mouthpieces do: 1. Reference a real scientific study with a genuine but conditional result, 2. Remove the qualifications associated with the study, so they can 3. Make a much stronger rhetorical conclusion.
Or they simply willfully misreport the results.It's exhausting exercise to have to continuously fact-check these shills. Here's just one example from the article:
"Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic."
That is not supported by the cited study. Earlier models estimated highly concentrated emissions; the cited paper concluded that emissions were distributed among far more rivers than previously thought.The cited paper actually helped overturn the older “a handful of rivers cause nearly everything” story. Yet the article uses it to tell essentially that same concentrated-source story.
Also, not "Half of ocean plastic." The paper actually says: “More than 1000 rivers account for 80% of global _riverine plastic emissions_ into the ocean." They did not measure half of all plastic in the ocean. The paper modeled annual floating macroplastic (not microplastics) emissions from rivers to ocean. That is different from: "all plastic already present in the ocean or "all plastic entering the ocean from every source".
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
the article and most comments here are focused in the wrong direction.
To me the real and only question is, can burying trash in landfills be made environmentally safe, and is it sustainable enough that we can do it for the next 100 years after which solar powered robots can mine those goldmines for new uses?
my time on earth is limited, and I'd prefer not to spend it handling trash; this waste of human life and potential is an irretrievable cost. I'd prefer not to even have had it dominating and skewing politics since the 1970s. Leisure time before you die is precious, that's something we can all agree on.
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.
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]
This author does what other pro-industry mouthpieces do: 1. Reference a real scientific study with a genuine but conditional result, 2. Remove the qualifications associated with the study, so they can 3. Make a much stronger rhetorical conclusion.
Or they simply willfully misreport the results.It's exhausting exercise to have to continuously fact-check these shills. Here's just one example from the article:
"Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic."
That is not supported by the cited study. Earlier models estimated highly concentrated emissions; the cited paper concluded that emissions were distributed among far more rivers than previously thought.The cited paper actually helped overturn the older “a handful of rivers cause nearly everything” story. Yet the article uses it to tell essentially that same concentrated-source story.
Also, not "Half of ocean plastic." The paper actually says: “More than 1000 rivers account for 80% of global _riverine plastic emissions_ into the ocean." They did not measure half of all plastic in the ocean. The paper modeled annual floating macroplastic (not microplastics) emissions from rivers to ocean. That is different from: "all plastic already present in the ocean or "all plastic entering the ocean from every source".
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.
If you have enough bags, you don’t need to keep accepting new ones. We have used the same collection of bags for over 15 years.
[dead]
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 would wager the median number of uses per cotton bag is way below 173 store visits.
Why would it be that low? I am using 3 if them that are around a decade old.
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?
Because I remember to take mine maybe 25% of the time
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.
"fell appart", really?
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 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).
Also the best way to manage waste is to not generate it in the first place.
I visited some places that package nearly all their vegetables and fruits in 1 use plastic containers, this is bonkers.
Right, if we have a limited resource of something valuable, should we just use it up once and throw out the product entirely?
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 can be made from synthetic oil; it's often higher quality as a result. Oil is not a limiting factor.
Plastic is a good mechanism for carbon sequestration. Pull some carbon from the air and use it to make something both useful and permanent.
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.
The author of this comment thinks everyone is like him or her.
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!
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?
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.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535835
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.
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.
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.
the article and most comments here are focused in the wrong direction.
To me the real and only question is, can burying trash in landfills be made environmentally safe, and is it sustainable enough that we can do it for the next 100 years after which solar powered robots can mine those goldmines for new uses?
my time on earth is limited, and I'd prefer not to spend it handling trash; this waste of human life and potential is an irretrievable cost. I'd prefer not to even have had it dominating and skewing politics since the 1970s. Leisure time before you die is precious, that's something we can all agree on.
[dupe] Discussion on alt url: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535835
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
The whole cotton bag thing could only work for people who already carry bags around all the time.
OT: I really like the aesthetics of this site.
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.
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."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44
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]
1. https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/officials-say-stinky-fir...
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