Comment by rob74
17 hours ago
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
I’m relatively sure that electronics are not recycled properly anywhere. At best some of the metals are extracted (hopefully not by mixing the ashes with mercury).
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> "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
This sentiment is the case because very often that's where recycling ultimately ends, we just pay someone to move it far away from us so we don't have to see it when it happens.
Until 2018, when they finally stopped accepting it, one of the US largest exports to China was cardboard boxes sent over for "recycling". We burned tons of bunker fuel shipping back the boxes Chinese goods arrived in. The net environmental impact would likely have been less had we just kept the boxes at home.
It's strange to me how often people prefer a widely acknowledged lie than to simply admit the truth.
I always recycle though because the recycle bin in my city is larger than my trash bin, and I don't have enough room in my trash bin sometimes.
It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
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Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).
Can you elaborate on that?
Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
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Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch?
(The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.
Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails.
Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view?
The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.
Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.
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That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint.
The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.
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> Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.
Directly reusing plastic bottles that were not meant to be is bad for your health though, isn't it?
The biggest risks are that single-use bottles are usually pretty difficult to clean (usually a narrow opening). The second biggest, which is related, is that those single-use bottles usually aren't very rigid and will tend to make small cracks in the surface as the material flexes which makes things even harder to clean. After that, all the cracks that will develop will mean it'll leach out the bad stuff in the plastics far faster than if you had some other kind of water bottle.
If you just opened it and drank the drink in it, there's probably no harm in filling it soon after and using it a few times like that. Using that same disposable bottle for a few months is probably not a good idea.
>they could use a non-rechargeable battery
The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would drain charge first.
But that brings in the second issue of the device not being refillable, which may be the bigger sin.
Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.
> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it?
You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.
And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.
Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
I concur on this one.
Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.