I can tell you are European. You think that transit succes in one of your Countries (which is is the size of one or two of our 50 states) is awesome. But if you look at 30+ nations in Europe, you are just as bad when lumped together as the US is when lumped together.
Europe has 50 sovereign nations, while the EU has 28 member states. So I wonder what you are lumping together...when people speak of the great or good state of public transit in Europe, they generally refer to Western Europe. A lot of countries in Europe are poor. I can guess public transit in Albania might be bad (though, not necessarily, as much poorer large Eastern European cities often have better public transit than comparable American cities).
Transit in New York is quite good, despite the article's mentioning that its use isn't at its peak. Transit in the highly populated areas of the US is comparable to transit in Europe.
Depends on your definition of "comparable". I've been to California. Would you call Los Angeles County a "highly populated place"? I would. How about the San Diego area? That too. Now, I would hardly call transit use there and in similarly populated areas in Western Europe "comparable". What about Dallas? Also highly populated. Not with comparable transit use...
Also, you have no idea what it is like to live in the Western United States, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Dakotas, Arizon, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas (which by itself is larger in land than any Western European country) etc...? All of these states are as big as your single counties. In these states, large areas of land are populated by people who live a mile or more between every house. Do you have any towns where there are only 2,000 people living in the town, yet the town looks like a far bigger town, almost a city, because there are 30,000 people who live in the surrounding thirty mile radius, highly spread out? Or if you have a couple of these towns, are the norm, not the exception?
Actually I do, as I've been to some of those places. I also lived in Canada for 14+ years, which has similar issues with remoteness and spread-out towns. You are completely missing the point here. Nobody says there should be a bus every 5 minutes in a town of 20,000 people in the middle of the desert in Utah. I'm not saying there should be a streetcar connecting two 5000-person towns in the Texas backcountry.
The problem is with how America has built its large cities. Like Dallas. Or LA. Or Detroit. The list goes on. Completely car-centric. Too spread-out. Designed around freeways, meant to be traversed almost exclusively by car. Even where transit might make sense, it's not run, or if it is run, it's not properly managed and funded. It's looked at as a service for poor people who cannot afford a car, so no wonder people complain that all the riders are hobos and whatever. You get what you make of it. Walking to places is also difficult, or just impossible/impractical. Forget efficient transportation and energy sustainability - this just makes for bad, boring, depressing cities. None of this was by accident. It was all intentional. Planners made it so. Read Jane Jacobs. She was American. She figured it out.
I hear the same uneducated garbage about the british mailing system. You can send a letter anywhere in England and it will be there by the next morning. Why can't the US mailing system be just as good. Well, it is in highly populated areas the size of England, but we are about 50 times the size of England.
Well, FedEx seems to do next-day delivery for most of the US, obviously it'll cost more than a stamp or two for the reasons you state. Wait, USPS offers overnight delivery (for more than a stamp of course) to most locations. Now, from what I've heard - from Americans - the problems with the USPS stem more from Congress mismanaging it (including people who want to "prove" a government-run postal service is bad by running it into the ground) then from the size of the country.
What you describe is pretty much ONLY in a few very large cities in the US, like NYC, Chicago, LA....etc.
Well, traffic seems pretty bad in a mid-size city like Portland, OR, too (where there is decent transit, walkable neighbourhoods, and lots of people bike). The cities you list have atrocious traffic.
you should be afraid of the criminals, like gang members that are quite often illegally armed.
Yeah, as I said, you've got bigger problems than the state of transit...
It might be that a legal licensed citizen could be there to stop and protect you from one of the criminals I just described.
More likely he'd get me killed, because pulling his gun would probably cause the criminal to start shooting...
I consider carrying a pistol on the same level as carrying a pocket knife....a tool for the day.
Btu anyway, I like driving, I buy fun sports cars, and every time I turn the ignition, it is a small adventure to me, and I crank on the tunes, and jam out while driving.....I get to observer the outside world a bit and enjoy the scenery.
Well, not everywhere is the same. A sports car is not fun when you're stuck bumper to bumper on the freeway. The scenery is not enjoyable when it consists of 10 lanes of barely moving traffic. Where you are, or where you drive, it may be great, sure, but it's not a general rule. In large cities, it's definitely not the most common case.
I can also carry my CCW with me in MY car to my destination, I hear you cannot do that on some forms of public transport in some states.
Yeah...so you folks in America definitely got bigger problems than the cars vs. transit debate. You do realize that what you just wrote would sound, like, insane in any other developed Western country? You don't want to take the bus 'cause you can't carry your concealed firearm with you...well, good. I wouldn't want a wacko with a gun next to me on the bus either. When I'm in the US again next month, I'll be sure to check the local transit authority's rules on that, and avoid using them if they let people with hidden guns on. I wouldn't feel safe in a bus or train where random passengers might be armed.
And I didn't even mention the stupid rules they have:
- I'm not allowed to eat or drink anything;
- I can't have pepperspray on me;
- Not that I have one, but even if I had a firearm and CCW permit I would not be allowed to carry it;
San Jose's public transportation sounds pretty poorly managed from your description, so it's no wonder people prefer to drive. However, if you feel the need to carry peppespray or firearms on you on your way to work, or wherever, I'd say San Jose has bigger problems than its light rail system.
Also, you complain here about not being able to eat anything on the train, while later in your post you complain about odours on the train. I'm sure you realize that, if everyone could eat on the train, the odours would be that much more unpleasant? The sweat and garlic... Finally, I hope you don't eat while driving, since that's a bit of a safety hazard.
For mass transit to work and be as convenient you need 24h busses every 15-30m during the day and hourly at night with stops about every 0.5-1 km.
I can tell you're American, you folks think a bus or train every 15 minutes is "frequent service". LOL. No, you would need a sub-10 min. frequency during peak periods, and for certains modes of transportation (like buses), you would need a stop even less than every 500 m (for subways, sub-500 m doesn't make sense, both due to acceleration/deccelaration of large trains, plus the cost of stations, which cost more than the tunnels typically). You don't really need 24h service (although it's nice to have) 5 AM - midnight/1 AM service is just fine in most places.
This works if the government (aka taxes) pays for it but is also a massive waste of fuel and taxpayers money as near empty busses drive around. You need at least 15% capacity on EVERY bus to make it compete with cars AND to pay for a driver.
You can't evaluate public transit just by looking at its running costs and fare revenue. Public transit has numerous other positives coming through various knock-on effects, and there are many studies which quantify this and put a $ figure on it. Subsidized public transit can be and often is a net positive.
I used mass transit for commute in Europe, it's great but then you also see the waste when you see the 10am train transporting 5 passengers and 5 crew.
Once you have the train, and the tracks, and the crew (paid to do an 8 hr shift in any case), the incremental cost of running an extra train is quite low. Systems are typically dimensioned for peak periods, so the cost of running the service in off-peak is basically negligible. You must also realize that that "empty" train at 10 AM is actually driving ridership at other, "fuller" periods. People are more likely to buy a transit pass or consider using it at all if they know it runs pretty much all the time, instead of just when the trains would be full. I'll be more likely to take the train to work if I know I can also use my monthly pass to take an empty train at 10 AM to the park or wherever when I'm off work. Or that I will be able to take an empty train back home at 11 PM if I stay late at work or decide to do something after work close to my office in the evening or...and so forth. Would you be more likely to buy a car if someone told you a) you can drive it whenever you want, wherever you want or b) you can only drive it to work in the morning, and back home in the afternoon?
Every consider that the modern person just doesn't want to ride mass transit for their daily lives?
It has absolutely nothing to do with being a "modern person". I am a "modern person" and I prefer using public transit to driving. It has to do with two things:
1) What you're used to, and what your experience of driving vs. public transit is.
2) How the place you live in is configured, i.e. is it transit-oriented or car-oriented.
Even if it was clean, on time and lacked smelly bums.....why would I choose public transportation when I can more easily and directly have door-to-door services with my own car?
"Door to door" only works when you have a parking spot in front of both doors, i.e. one in front of your home, and one in front of your destination. While I know most of North America is configured this way, a lot of places in this world (including a fair bit in North America) are not. I challenge you to drive "door-to-door" in Manhattan, for instance. If you have to park a long way away from either, or both doors, than transit becomes more convenient: actually much closer to "door-to-door" then driving.
Unless you are down and out with regards to money, why would anyone choose it?
Because it's more convenient, and faster? This gets us back to point 2) above. How does the city you live in look like? Of course, I'm not saying it makes sense to take public transit in every place. Some places, it just sucks, for various reasons - but do not make the mistake of generalizing. Whether public transit makes sense or not is a consequence of very deliberate decisions by city planners. Whether the service sucks or not is a consequence of very deliberate decisions by city officials. There is almost nothing "natural" about the state of public transit in a given place (I say almost, because in some places geography forces cities to be high density, for example). The "free market" also has very little to do with it as well.
The times I come close to wanting to go somewhere and not drive or park....I uber. Again, it is door-to-door.
You're right, Uber is door-to-door, but most people's budgets cannot handle Ubering 2-4 times per day. That's why I laugh when people say that services like Uber will replace public transit...unless Uber will drive me 10-15 miles for $2, or let me have unlimited drives in a city wherever I want, whenever I want for $50-100 a month, then, well, no, it ain't replacing any serious public transit systems in any way.
This is especially important when there is inclement weather, or when, like here, it is fscking 95F out with 98% humidity. If you're dressed at all to look nice for work, etc, you don't wanna be sweating your ass off by the time you get to work.
Buses and trains can have air-conditioning. It's a thing. Lot's of people in suits in NYC or Toronto or wherever take the subway and buses to work, when it's 95F and 98% humidity. I won't even get into the wider issue there, which is that people who live in places where it's 95F and 98% humidity set the thermostat in their offices to 65F and crank up the AC so people can be comfortable sitting at their desks in suits. This is a waste of resources on an epic scale, for no valid reason whatsoever.
In many cases the editors are not paid either. So reviewers work for free, editors work for free, and the publishers just collect a tidy sum on the name recognition. Often they don't even select/vet the reviewers (editors do that instead), they just select/vet the editors.
One big scam is the hybrid journal, where you pay for the article to be OA, but you library still pays for a subscription to the journal. The new annoucement rules this out, so this is an advance.
There is another type of "hybrid" journal - free to publish (and thus not OA), but pay for "overpage charges" and make a killing on that. I'm looking at you, IEEE Transactions on [whatever]: the limit for a paper is 8 pages, but this includes mandatory author biographies (with photographs) and references. Since the average number of coauthors has gone up over the years, the bios easily take up a page. Down to 7. The editors require vast amounts of references in order to boost the citation indices of the journal, they'll bug you for "more recent references" even if you've been dilligent and included every relevant reference there is (no matter, the less relevant and only slightly connected to your topic are welcome as well...as long as they are from the same journal!), so the references also easily take up a page.
So now you have 6 pages left. That includes a title in huge type, an abstract, and possibly a list of symbols with explanations (not done in every journal), thus hacking off another half a page potentially. Conference papers, on the other hand, usually allow 6 pages (some 8), do not include bios, accept a way shorter reference list, usually do not ask for a list of symbols, often do not put the title in huge type (some do) and ask for shorter abstracts (and in any case do not care how short you cut your abstract). Now, if you've published your idea at a conference first (usually the case), the journal version must have significant new/additional/different content (a reasonable requirement - other than the 8-page limit of course!). Finally let's add in the reviewers, who usually ask for a long list of additions, clarifications, extra details and so forth without being restrained in any way by the editor.
So now you've got a 12 page paper and page 9 and above costs $162 per page (or whatever it is). Btw, there is no upper limit on pages. You can publish a 20, or 25, or 40 page paper. So it's a closed access journal, ostensibly free to publish, ostensibly living off of subscriptions, but additionally raking in thousands of dollars per issue on the overlength charges.
The kinds of social decisions we can make, that is to say, the kind that are practical, are determined by the technology available.
You can't choose to have a city, and to have zero slave labor, if you tech level is only what the Romans had. The choice to abolish slavery was made only after the tech level made people productive enough that the city could function on the effort of paid laborers who are free to choose their own jobs.
And so on.
Actually, the Romans had access to a whole bunch of technology that could have replaced a lot of the slave labour but chose not to use it. They 1) thought it would be a bother to have a lot of jobless slaves and 2) figured slaves were cheaper in most cases. In other cases, they just didn't see the technology as something that could be useful for work and production, since they had slaves for that and didn't think there was any need to tinker with that.
Just like today, there are a lot of things you could easily automate (the technology exists), but it's still cheaper to have people do the work...especially if you can outsource the labour to a cheap and poor country. You can see today when you go from a country where labour is cheap to a country where labour is expensive, that in the latter, there is a lot more automation.
As for whether slavery was necessary in Roman society to build its cities...well, ancient China also had large cities, was technologically similar to Rome, but was much less reliant on slaves. Slaves existed yes, but were usually a much smaller portion of the population than in the Roman Empire and many emperors actively tried to ban slavery or reduce it.
No, more like levels the playing field and helps to protect drivers and passengers. Uber and Lyft have been avoiding standard transport fees and regulations for years, eliminating the fair playing competition. You may call it "fixing an antiquated business model" like most young people would, but you fail to see the reasoning behind the rules and regulations of transportation. Those rules and regulations are there for the protection of consumers and employees.
I'm all against Uber and Lyft operating in contravention of laws and regulations, and all for them respecting all the current laws and regulations, whatever those might be.
However I'm also for new business models being a chance to have a debate about those laws and regulations. How many of them are really protecting consumers and employees, and how many are just protecting someone's monopoly? No one will ever sell you a law or regulation by saying that it's supposed to eliminate someone's competition, but it happens a lot. Also, if a law or regulation made sense in 1935 or 1965, does it still make sense today?
I'm not saying the conclusion has to be that the laws must change. However, if there is a way of doing things in a different way today, why not talk about if the laws need to change.
But the number of taxis are regulated by the city to limit congestion.
This is the official explanation. However I think it's not the only reason it's done...I'd venture to say that in most places, it's not even the main reason.
The main reason is to limit competition and basically guarantee a certain income for the taxi drivers / taxi companies.
Does it really also reduce congestion? I don't know. Let's say the amount of taxis was not regulated, so there would be more of them at a lower price. Would this maybe then get more people to use taxis, instead of their own cars, thereby also having a positive effect on congestion? I don't know, and it probably varies from place to place. I don't really think anyone has checked, but "limiting congestion" is a great excuse for covering up "limiting competition and keeping prices up".
Because I'm such an nerd I visited classes from other departments in my free time and also watched lectures online. I happen to know that those from the humanities learn about the scientific method. How to collect data and how important it is to disprove the null hypothesis if you process your statistical data. They learn to be aware of biases that THEY as the observer and processor of the data can bring into it and so forth.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?
People who use statistics in social sciences (including those that completely depend on it for their work) tend to learn about statistics and math in a very shallow way. There are exceptions of course, but most of these people were not very good at math in school and/or do not like math very much. So they learn things very superficially, here's a stats software package (e.g. SPSS), we do this test in this situation, that test in that situation, enter your data, click click, what's the p-value? Make a conclusion. A lot of the conclusions are just plain garbage. Reproducibility? Errr, right...
Then there is the completely unrelated issue that a lot of "humanities" today is just plain lightly dressed-up political activism (e.g. gender studies). Then this activism spreads to other fields which should be about objective (as much as possible) study, such as history and classics. That's a whole other topic.
Finally, there is the problem that a lot of liberal arts & humanities have closed onto themselves, and became arcane self-referential disciplines without a real or obvious connection to the outside world. Sure, the same happens in some fields of natural sciences, but people generally have an easier idea of how natural science and engineering affect the "real world". When it comes to post-modern literary criticism - not so much.
The bad wrap the liberal arts & humanities get is mostly the liberal arts' & humanities' fault. It's not they are not relevant, it's that over the past few decades they themselves have made their own fields look less relevant to the rest of society.
Survive a fall onto a hard surface without breaking/deforming.
Plastic bottles can also deform after a fall, not to the same extent as metal of course. I also don't get what the problem with deformation is, as long as it doesn't break (who cares if a metal can has a dint in it?).
While a plastic bottle will not break after falling onto a hard surface, it will often open and spill its contents. It happened to me tons of times. Most recently, I lost half a jar of honey this way...
Allow dispensing of contents without a utensil (e.g., condiments or shampoo).
Granted. However, I was not really thinking of shampoo when talking about plastic bottles (I guess you could call the thing shampoo comes in a bottle, sure, it's just not how I think of it). Most of the stuff that comes in plastic bottles is not stuff you need to squeeze out (water and soft drinks) however, so we could still replace the vast majority of them without a problem. Condiments - OK, I think we can live with having to scrape out the remaining ketchup in the glass ketchup bottle with a spoon...or just learn to be very skillful at yanking the bottle just right to make it come out. It's not really a big deal.
How likely are producers to cut their profits to cover the extra material and transportation costs?
Sure they'll first try to pass on the cost to the consumers. If the consumers are OK with that - fine, it's not a big price to pay to reduce pollution. If the consumers are not OK with, either the producers will cut their profits to lower the price - also fine - or there will be less bottled drinks sold as demand will fall - also fine, as bottled water and Coca Cola are not essential products. Whichever way, it will work out.
Making plastic is significantly less energy and thus CO2 intensive than glass, paper or metal, especially when recycled.
Energy intensive != CO2 intensive, especially in a world where we are moving away from fossil fuels more and more for electricity generation. Not to mention that it's standard practice to put aluminum smelters or paper mills close to cheap sources of electricity - which usually means hydropower or a nuclear plant. On the other hand, plastic is made from fossil fuels (apart from a very small percentage of the total which are bioplastics).
Plastic is also terrible for recycling compared to glass and metal. Unless you sort your plastic carefully, you will almost always end up with an inferior product. Similarly, it's very rare to recycle a plastic thing back into the same thing: most PET bottles are made from virgin plastic, and most PET bottles are recycled into something other than PET bottles (like say, carpets or synthetic fabric). A glass bottle is not only easily recyclable into another glass bottle, but is easily resuable: all over the world, beer bottles get washed and refilled many times before being sent for recycling (i.e., being broken down so that new glass products can be made from them). PET bottles are reused only on a personal level, but they are not as durable as glass bottles and using them for a long time is generally not recommended for health reasons (the bottles start to leech into the liquid they store).
Usually if it's cheap, it's also good for the environment.
Often not, becuase things often seem "cheap" because some externality is outsourced or not being paid for (directly). A plastic bottle may be cheaper than a glass one if we look just at a single use, and only from production to being emptied and thrown away. If we factor in the reuse of glass bottles for example, than the plastic bottle is no longer cheaper.
The only reason to ban plastic would be because consumers behave like idiots.
That's far from the only reason, but I would argue that a lot of things are banned because people behave like idiots. A lot of laws are on the books because people behave like idiots. Sometimes you just have to accept that people will behave like idiots, and work around that.
Both regions have two common things. Poor populace and high temperatures. Former means that people buy their food and their personal hygiene items in portions for a day, or just a single meal, because they can't afford to pay for more than that. That means far more packaging for same amount of product as what you see in the Western countries.
First, smaller packages are not just some third-world phenomenon. In Switzerland, which is richer than the US, the average package size tends to be smaller than in North America since people buy less stuff in bulk for various reasons (houses and apartments are smaller, and there is less storage space; households have less people on average, etc.).
Second, while prepared foods (like sauces, pickled things and so on) and hygenic products are obviously packaged, people in poor countries do not buy individually wrapped fresh food (like fruits and vegetables), the way it's often done in the West. You will not get individually wrapped bananas (in plastic foil), the way you get them in Japan for instance (this is the pinnacle of lunacy in packaging - bananas have a natural "wrapper" already for God's sake!). Fresh food probably usually doesn't get purchased at a supermarket, but at an open-air farmer's market or whatever. So in terms of food, it's debatable whether poor countries actually have more packaging per kg of product.
Third, a lot of packaging in the West is unnecessary - it's either just stupid (the bananas in Japan), cosmetic (see-through plastic to allow you to see the product inside instead of a paper box), or anti-theft (product is small enough to fit in your pocket, so the packaging is made large enough so that it can't), etc. In poor countries, where the idea is to make things as cheap as possible, such unnecessary packaging is kept to a minimum. So again it's debatable whether you really see more packaging per volume of product than in the West.
Fourth, I've been to poor towns in Mexico where it is also hot. In the local stores, you're absolutely right - dominant package sizes are smaller than in the US or Canada. However a lot of those things (more than 50% I'd say) were actually packed in small aluminum cans and small glass bottles or jugs (canned food, sauces, that sort of thing). Bars of soap for example, they come both in individually packed in paper boxes and in plastic foil. So it isn't - and doesn't have to be - all plastic.
Latter means that food and much of hygienic products spoil rapidly unless they're sealed with air tight seals in durable packaging. No alternative packaging is as durable, as sealable and as cheap to make current state possible.
I've lived in places where it gets really hot, including inside of course, and I've never had hygienic products spoil. I've never kept them in the fridge either. Which hygienic products can spoil? Soap? Shampoo? Toothpaste? Now you say people buy things in small portions, basically single-use. So spoilage after the product is open is not really a problem, it will be used long before it has a chance to spoil. Now at the store or warehouse before opening, this is an issue of course - but I don't see why plastic packaging is the only answer? Glass and metal packaging is just as durable and just as airtight. In fact, it's better for long-term storage (plastic will leech into whatever its storing). So no, plastic is netiher the most durable nor the most sealable. It is however, probably, the cheapest, which is the main reason why it's used so much - especially in the poor countries. It's cheap however, only because the externalities - the garbage and the pollution - are not being paid for directly by the manufacturers and the consumers. If that cost was accounted for, plastic would not be the cheapest and other packaging would overtake it in like 90% of present use cases.
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And without this, much of the work that has been done on things like rise of quality of life in poor countries will see rev
You implied everything was just getting dumped, not the contaminants. Of course the contaminants are being dumped, otherwise they would not be contaminants.
There will need to be a massive cultural shift to actually get people in countries that used to export dirty plastic as "recyclable" to actually sort and wash their own plastic waste so it is actually recyclable at a reasonable cost.
It would be easier to just ban 90-95% of plastic packaging. Which I think will happen in the end. We used to live in a world without plastic packaging, when consumer goods were packaged in materials that were less damaging to the environment - glass, paper and metal. You could make the case that plastic is essential in some small number (5-10%) of today's use cases. It's not essential to have water or Coca Cola in a plastic bottle, nor to have your tomatoes pre-wrapped in plastic foil, nor to have butter in a plastic tub.
They may have cheap labor there, but I doubt they have the high tech and proper processes to handle everything cleanly and enviromental friendly way.
You don't need high tech to separate garbage. Do you use some sort of high tech when you separate garbage into recyclables, organics, and non-recyclables at home? No, just your hands (and your eyes and brain, of course). It's boring, annoying, dirty manual work. The type poor people in third-world countries will do.
You are right of course that the way the waste is handled is bad. Let's say you ship a container containing 80% recyclables and 20% contaminants to a poor Asian country...the 80% recyclables will be extracted and used. The 20% contaminants...who knows, might just get dumped somewhere. The workers, probably have lax protection (if any) from handling toxic materials, and so forth.
Basically, this is outsourcing labour from the West to Asia again. The labour of lazy Westerners who don't want to bother to separate their own garbage. Municipalities know that if you have just one bin labelled "recycling" and are pretty lax about what people put in there, than people are more likely to recycle, i.e. less recyclables end in the "regular" garbage stream that goes to a landfill. However, you get a contaminated recycling stream that someone must sift through.
Not to mention people's habit of leaving liquid inside their drinking bottles and reinstalling the caps when throwing them into the recycle bin. C'mon guys, knock that stupid ignorant shit off.
How about we just ban plastic bottles? Then figure out what do with the ones we have (how to recycle them / burn them, or whatever).
What exactly can a plastic bottle do that a glass bottle, or metal can, or some sort of paper/cardboard container cannot? I mean other than contaminate oceans for centuries. Drinks from metal and glass containers taste better than drinks from plastic ones. They are less contaminated. The only benefit is that plastic is cheap and light, so producers get to save some money and increase profit margins...well cry me a river.
The problem isn't the actual recycling. The problem is that China accepts scrap with high levels of contaminants while nobody else does. Why? Well they were really just putting this stuff in the ground, burning it or dumping it in the ocean.
Well, no. I don't understand why everyone assumes that just because recycling was being shipped overseas then it must have been just dumped in a landfill or in the sea. The Chinese are too stupid to recycle, or what?
Yes, there was certainly some dumping going and some shady "recycling" companies in China were not really recycling everything. This however, was not the whole industry. The main reason China was accepting scrap with high levels of contaminants was that labour in China was cheap enough to have people go through it manually and separate the contanimants from the useful stuff. Yes, the contaminants (and the scrap that had become too contaminated to use) was in the end getting dumped or burned (what else can be done with it?), but only after the useful scrap was separated and actually sent for recycling.
What has changed? As China has gotten richer, labour costs have risen. If you have less people willing to work for peanuts to sort through garbage and separate the PET bottles from the used wet wipes, it's more likely the whole shipment would be dumped. Chinese authorities are not stupid...also, as China has become richer, it has started producing a lot more garbage of its own. China has enough of its own garbage to deal with, it doesn't want other people's anymore, naturally. So they said we're glad to still take your recyclables, under the condition that they are clean and ready to recycle immediately - you do your own sifting through your own garbage.
Finally, China has ambitious plans to upgrade its economy to focus on high-tech, high-wage work...this is just one piece of that puzzle, discouraging low-paying, low-tech industries.
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I can tell you are European. You think that transit succes in one of your Countries (which is is the size of one or two of our 50 states) is awesome. But if you look at 30+ nations in Europe, you are just as bad when lumped together as the US is when lumped together.
Europe has 50 sovereign nations, while the EU has 28 member states. So I wonder what you are lumping together...when people speak of the great or good state of public transit in Europe, they generally refer to Western Europe. A lot of countries in Europe are poor. I can guess public transit in Albania might be bad (though, not necessarily, as much poorer large Eastern European cities often have better public transit than comparable American cities).
Transit in New York is quite good, despite the article's mentioning that its use isn't at its peak. Transit in the highly populated areas of the US is comparable to transit in Europe.
Depends on your definition of "comparable". I've been to California. Would you call Los Angeles County a "highly populated place"? I would. How about the San Diego area? That too. Now, I would hardly call transit use there and in similarly populated areas in Western Europe "comparable". What about Dallas? Also highly populated. Not with comparable transit use...
Also, you have no idea what it is like to live in the Western United States, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Dakotas, Arizon, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas (which by itself is larger in land than any Western European country) etc...? All of these states are as big as your single counties. In these states, large areas of land are populated by people who live a mile or more between every house. Do you have any towns where there are only 2,000 people living in the town, yet the town looks like a far bigger town, almost a city, because there are 30,000 people who live in the surrounding thirty mile radius, highly spread out? Or if you have a couple of these towns, are the norm, not the exception?
Actually I do, as I've been to some of those places. I also lived in Canada for 14+ years, which has similar issues with remoteness and spread-out towns. You are completely missing the point here. Nobody says there should be a bus every 5 minutes in a town of 20,000 people in the middle of the desert in Utah. I'm not saying there should be a streetcar connecting two 5000-person towns in the Texas backcountry.
The problem is with how America has built its large cities. Like Dallas. Or LA. Or Detroit. The list goes on. Completely car-centric. Too spread-out. Designed around freeways, meant to be traversed almost exclusively by car. Even where transit might make sense, it's not run, or if it is run, it's not properly managed and funded. It's looked at as a service for poor people who cannot afford a car, so no wonder people complain that all the riders are hobos and whatever. You get what you make of it. Walking to places is also difficult, or just impossible/impractical. Forget efficient transportation and energy sustainability - this just makes for bad, boring, depressing cities. None of this was by accident. It was all intentional. Planners made it so. Read Jane Jacobs. She was American. She figured it out.
I hear the same uneducated garbage about the british mailing system. You can send a letter anywhere in England and it will be there by the next morning. Why can't the US mailing system be just as good. Well, it is in highly populated areas the size of England, but we are about 50 times the size of England.
Well, FedEx seems to do next-day delivery for most of the US, obviously it'll cost more than a stamp or two for the reasons you state. Wait, USPS offers overnight delivery (for more than a stamp of course) to most locations. Now, from what I've heard - from Americans - the problems with the USPS stem more from Congress mismanaging it (including people who want to "prove" a government-run postal service is bad by running it into the ground) then from the size of the country.
What you describe is pretty much ONLY in a few very large cities in the US, like NYC, Chicago, LA....etc.
Well, traffic seems pretty bad in a mid-size city like Portland, OR, too (where there is decent transit, walkable neighbourhoods, and lots of people bike). The cities you list have atrocious traffic.
you should be afraid of the criminals, like gang members that are quite often illegally armed.
Yeah, as I said, you've got bigger problems than the state of transit...
It might be that a legal licensed citizen could be there to stop and protect you from one of the criminals I just described.
More likely he'd get me killed, because pulling his gun would probably cause the criminal to start shooting...
I consider carrying a pistol on the same level as carrying a pocket knife....a tool for the day.
That's 'cause, you're like, crazy, man.
Btu anyway, I like driving, I buy fun sports cars, and every time I turn the ignition, it is a small adventure to me, and I crank on the tunes, and jam out while driving.....I get to observer the outside world a bit and enjoy the scenery.
Well, not everywhere is the same. A sports car is not fun when you're stuck bumper to bumper on the freeway. The scenery is not enjoyable when it consists of 10 lanes of barely moving traffic. Where you are, or where you drive, it may be great, sure, but it's not a general rule. In large cities, it's definitely not the most common case.
I can also carry my CCW with me in MY car to my destination, I hear you cannot do that on some forms of public transport in some states.
Yeah...so you folks in America definitely got bigger problems than the cars vs. transit debate. You do realize that what you just wrote would sound, like, insane in any other developed Western country? You don't want to take the bus 'cause you can't carry your concealed firearm with you...well, good. I wouldn't want a wacko with a gun next to me on the bus either. When I'm in the US again next month, I'll be sure to check the local transit authority's rules on that, and avoid using them if they let people with hidden guns on. I wouldn't feel safe in a bus or train where random passengers might be armed.
And I didn't even mention the stupid rules they have: - I'm not allowed to eat or drink anything; - I can't have pepperspray on me; - Not that I have one, but even if I had a firearm and CCW permit I would not be allowed to carry it;
San Jose's public transportation sounds pretty poorly managed from your description, so it's no wonder people prefer to drive. However, if you feel the need to carry peppespray or firearms on you on your way to work, or wherever, I'd say San Jose has bigger problems than its light rail system.
Also, you complain here about not being able to eat anything on the train, while later in your post you complain about odours on the train. I'm sure you realize that, if everyone could eat on the train, the odours would be that much more unpleasant? The sweat and garlic... Finally, I hope you don't eat while driving, since that's a bit of a safety hazard.
For mass transit to work and be as convenient you need 24h busses every 15-30m during the day and hourly at night with stops about every 0.5-1 km.
I can tell you're American, you folks think a bus or train every 15 minutes is "frequent service". LOL. No, you would need a sub-10 min. frequency during peak periods, and for certains modes of transportation (like buses), you would need a stop even less than every 500 m (for subways, sub-500 m doesn't make sense, both due to acceleration/deccelaration of large trains, plus the cost of stations, which cost more than the tunnels typically). You don't really need 24h service (although it's nice to have) 5 AM - midnight/1 AM service is just fine in most places.
This works if the government (aka taxes) pays for it but is also a massive waste of fuel and taxpayers money as near empty busses drive around. You need at least 15% capacity on EVERY bus to make it compete with cars AND to pay for a driver.
You can't evaluate public transit just by looking at its running costs and fare revenue. Public transit has numerous other positives coming through various knock-on effects, and there are many studies which quantify this and put a $ figure on it. Subsidized public transit can be and often is a net positive.
I used mass transit for commute in Europe, it's great but then you also see the waste when you see the 10am train transporting 5 passengers and 5 crew.
Once you have the train, and the tracks, and the crew (paid to do an 8 hr shift in any case), the incremental cost of running an extra train is quite low. Systems are typically dimensioned for peak periods, so the cost of running the service in off-peak is basically negligible. You must also realize that that "empty" train at 10 AM is actually driving ridership at other, "fuller" periods. People are more likely to buy a transit pass or consider using it at all if they know it runs pretty much all the time, instead of just when the trains would be full. I'll be more likely to take the train to work if I know I can also use my monthly pass to take an empty train at 10 AM to the park or wherever when I'm off work. Or that I will be able to take an empty train back home at 11 PM if I stay late at work or decide to do something after work close to my office in the evening or...and so forth. Would you be more likely to buy a car if someone told you a) you can drive it whenever you want, wherever you want or b) you can only drive it to work in the morning, and back home in the afternoon?
Every consider that the modern person just doesn't want to ride mass transit for their daily lives?
It has absolutely nothing to do with being a "modern person". I am a "modern person" and I prefer using public transit to driving. It has to do with two things:
1) What you're used to, and what your experience of driving vs. public transit is.
2) How the place you live in is configured, i.e. is it transit-oriented or car-oriented.
Even if it was clean, on time and lacked smelly bums.....why would I choose public transportation when I can more easily and directly have door-to-door services with my own car?
"Door to door" only works when you have a parking spot in front of both doors, i.e. one in front of your home, and one in front of your destination. While I know most of North America is configured this way, a lot of places in this world (including a fair bit in North America) are not. I challenge you to drive "door-to-door" in Manhattan, for instance. If you have to park a long way away from either, or both doors, than transit becomes more convenient: actually much closer to "door-to-door" then driving.
Unless you are down and out with regards to money, why would anyone choose it?
Because it's more convenient, and faster? This gets us back to point 2) above. How does the city you live in look like? Of course, I'm not saying it makes sense to take public transit in every place. Some places, it just sucks, for various reasons - but do not make the mistake of generalizing. Whether public transit makes sense or not is a consequence of very deliberate decisions by city planners. Whether the service sucks or not is a consequence of very deliberate decisions by city officials. There is almost nothing "natural" about the state of public transit in a given place (I say almost, because in some places geography forces cities to be high density, for example). The "free market" also has very little to do with it as well.
The times I come close to wanting to go somewhere and not drive or park....I uber. Again, it is door-to-door.
You're right, Uber is door-to-door, but most people's budgets cannot handle Ubering 2-4 times per day. That's why I laugh when people say that services like Uber will replace public transit...unless Uber will drive me 10-15 miles for $2, or let me have unlimited drives in a city wherever I want, whenever I want for $50-100 a month, then, well, no, it ain't replacing any serious public transit systems in any way.
This is especially important when there is inclement weather, or when, like here, it is fscking 95F out with 98% humidity. If you're dressed at all to look nice for work, etc, you don't wanna be sweating your ass off by the time you get to work.
Buses and trains can have air-conditioning. It's a thing. Lot's of people in suits in NYC or Toronto or wherever take the subway and buses to work, when it's 95F and 98% humidity. I won't even get into the wider issue there, which is that people who live in places where it's 95F and 98% humidity set the thermostat in their offices to 65F and crank up the AC so people can be comfortable sitting at their desks in suits. This is a waste of resources on an epic scale, for no valid reason whatsoever.
Germany tends to be a lot more mercantilist with stuff like this, especially with a CDU government.
In many cases the editors are not paid either. So reviewers work for free, editors work for free, and the publishers just collect a tidy sum on the name recognition. Often they don't even select/vet the reviewers (editors do that instead), they just select/vet the editors.
As usual, Germany lags behind. It is almost as if Germany wants to stay in the past in all things.
Maybe Springer Nature being majority German-owned has something to do with it.
One big scam is the hybrid journal, where you pay for the article to be OA, but you library still pays for a subscription to the journal. The new annoucement rules this out, so this is an advance.
There is another type of "hybrid" journal - free to publish (and thus not OA), but pay for "overpage charges" and make a killing on that. I'm looking at you, IEEE Transactions on [whatever]: the limit for a paper is 8 pages, but this includes mandatory author biographies (with photographs) and references. Since the average number of coauthors has gone up over the years, the bios easily take up a page. Down to 7. The editors require vast amounts of references in order to boost the citation indices of the journal, they'll bug you for "more recent references" even if you've been dilligent and included every relevant reference there is (no matter, the less relevant and only slightly connected to your topic are welcome as well...as long as they are from the same journal!), so the references also easily take up a page.
So now you have 6 pages left. That includes a title in huge type, an abstract, and possibly a list of symbols with explanations (not done in every journal), thus hacking off another half a page potentially. Conference papers, on the other hand, usually allow 6 pages (some 8), do not include bios, accept a way shorter reference list, usually do not ask for a list of symbols, often do not put the title in huge type (some do) and ask for shorter abstracts (and in any case do not care how short you cut your abstract). Now, if you've published your idea at a conference first (usually the case), the journal version must have significant new/additional/different content (a reasonable requirement - other than the 8-page limit of course!). Finally let's add in the reviewers, who usually ask for a long list of additions, clarifications, extra details and so forth without being restrained in any way by the editor.
So now you've got a 12 page paper and page 9 and above costs $162 per page (or whatever it is). Btw, there is no upper limit on pages. You can publish a 20, or 25, or 40 page paper. So it's a closed access journal, ostensibly free to publish, ostensibly living off of subscriptions, but additionally raking in thousands of dollars per issue on the overlength charges.
The kinds of social decisions we can make, that is to say, the kind that are practical, are determined by the technology available.
You can't choose to have a city, and to have zero slave labor, if you tech level is only what the Romans had. The choice to abolish slavery was made only after the tech level made people productive enough that the city could function on the effort of paid laborers who are free to choose their own jobs.
And so on.
Actually, the Romans had access to a whole bunch of technology that could have replaced a lot of the slave labour but chose not to use it. They 1) thought it would be a bother to have a lot of jobless slaves and 2) figured slaves were cheaper in most cases. In other cases, they just didn't see the technology as something that could be useful for work and production, since they had slaves for that and didn't think there was any need to tinker with that.
Just like today, there are a lot of things you could easily automate (the technology exists), but it's still cheaper to have people do the work...especially if you can outsource the labour to a cheap and poor country. You can see today when you go from a country where labour is cheap to a country where labour is expensive, that in the latter, there is a lot more automation.
As for whether slavery was necessary in Roman society to build its cities...well, ancient China also had large cities, was technologically similar to Rome, but was much less reliant on slaves. Slaves existed yes, but were usually a much smaller portion of the population than in the Roman Empire and many emperors actively tried to ban slavery or reduce it.
Cars make life better,
Where? For whom? In which situations?
A blanket statement like that is simply not true.
and eliminate competition
No, more like levels the playing field and helps to protect drivers and passengers. Uber and Lyft have been avoiding standard transport fees and regulations for years, eliminating the fair playing competition. You may call it "fixing an antiquated business model" like most young people would, but you fail to see the reasoning behind the rules and regulations of transportation. Those rules and regulations are there for the protection of consumers and employees.
I'm all against Uber and Lyft operating in contravention of laws and regulations, and all for them respecting all the current laws and regulations, whatever those might be.
However I'm also for new business models being a chance to have a debate about those laws and regulations. How many of them are really protecting consumers and employees, and how many are just protecting someone's monopoly? No one will ever sell you a law or regulation by saying that it's supposed to eliminate someone's competition, but it happens a lot. Also, if a law or regulation made sense in 1935 or 1965, does it still make sense today?
I'm not saying the conclusion has to be that the laws must change. However, if there is a way of doing things in a different way today, why not talk about if the laws need to change.
But the number of taxis are regulated by the city to limit congestion.
This is the official explanation. However I think it's not the only reason it's done...I'd venture to say that in most places, it's not even the main reason.
The main reason is to limit competition and basically guarantee a certain income for the taxi drivers / taxi companies.
Does it really also reduce congestion? I don't know. Let's say the amount of taxis was not regulated, so there would be more of them at a lower price. Would this maybe then get more people to use taxis, instead of their own cars, thereby also having a positive effect on congestion? I don't know, and it probably varies from place to place. I don't really think anyone has checked, but "limiting congestion" is a great excuse for covering up "limiting competition and keeping prices up".
No, the other three are Virgil, Al, and Calvin...
I am sure the author of the article is anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
Because I'm such an nerd I visited classes from other departments in my free time and also watched lectures online. I happen to know that those from the humanities learn about the scientific method. How to collect data and how important it is to disprove the null hypothesis if you process your statistical data. They learn to be aware of biases that THEY as the observer and processor of the data can bring into it and so forth.
They learn about it, but not enough. Have you seen things that pass for "scientific research" in most social sciences these days?
People who use statistics in social sciences (including those that completely depend on it for their work) tend to learn about statistics and math in a very shallow way. There are exceptions of course, but most of these people were not very good at math in school and/or do not like math very much. So they learn things very superficially, here's a stats software package (e.g. SPSS), we do this test in this situation, that test in that situation, enter your data, click click, what's the p-value? Make a conclusion. A lot of the conclusions are just plain garbage. Reproducibility? Errr, right...
Then there is the completely unrelated issue that a lot of "humanities" today is just plain lightly dressed-up political activism (e.g. gender studies). Then this activism spreads to other fields which should be about objective (as much as possible) study, such as history and classics. That's a whole other topic.
Finally, there is the problem that a lot of liberal arts & humanities have closed onto themselves, and became arcane self-referential disciplines without a real or obvious connection to the outside world. Sure, the same happens in some fields of natural sciences, but people generally have an easier idea of how natural science and engineering affect the "real world". When it comes to post-modern literary criticism - not so much.
The bad wrap the liberal arts & humanities get is mostly the liberal arts' & humanities' fault. It's not they are not relevant, it's that over the past few decades they themselves have made their own fields look less relevant to the rest of society.
Survive a fall onto a hard surface without breaking/deforming.
Plastic bottles can also deform after a fall, not to the same extent as metal of course. I also don't get what the problem with deformation is, as long as it doesn't break (who cares if a metal can has a dint in it?).
While a plastic bottle will not break after falling onto a hard surface, it will often open and spill its contents. It happened to me tons of times. Most recently, I lost half a jar of honey this way...
Allow dispensing of contents without a utensil (e.g., condiments or shampoo).
Granted. However, I was not really thinking of shampoo when talking about plastic bottles (I guess you could call the thing shampoo comes in a bottle, sure, it's just not how I think of it). Most of the stuff that comes in plastic bottles is not stuff you need to squeeze out (water and soft drinks) however, so we could still replace the vast majority of them without a problem. Condiments - OK, I think we can live with having to scrape out the remaining ketchup in the glass ketchup bottle with a spoon...or just learn to be very skillful at yanking the bottle just right to make it come out. It's not really a big deal.
How likely are producers to cut their profits to cover the extra material and transportation costs?
Sure they'll first try to pass on the cost to the consumers. If the consumers are OK with that - fine, it's not a big price to pay to reduce pollution. If the consumers are not OK with, either the producers will cut their profits to lower the price - also fine - or there will be less bottled drinks sold as demand will fall - also fine, as bottled water and Coca Cola are not essential products. Whichever way, it will work out.
Making plastic is significantly less energy and thus CO2 intensive than glass, paper or metal, especially when recycled.
Energy intensive != CO2 intensive, especially in a world where we are moving away from fossil fuels more and more for electricity generation. Not to mention that it's standard practice to put aluminum smelters or paper mills close to cheap sources of electricity - which usually means hydropower or a nuclear plant. On the other hand, plastic is made from fossil fuels (apart from a very small percentage of the total which are bioplastics).
Plastic is also terrible for recycling compared to glass and metal. Unless you sort your plastic carefully, you will almost always end up with an inferior product. Similarly, it's very rare to recycle a plastic thing back into the same thing: most PET bottles are made from virgin plastic, and most PET bottles are recycled into something other than PET bottles (like say, carpets or synthetic fabric). A glass bottle is not only easily recyclable into another glass bottle, but is easily resuable: all over the world, beer bottles get washed and refilled many times before being sent for recycling (i.e., being broken down so that new glass products can be made from them). PET bottles are reused only on a personal level, but they are not as durable as glass bottles and using them for a long time is generally not recommended for health reasons (the bottles start to leech into the liquid they store).
Usually if it's cheap, it's also good for the environment.
Often not, becuase things often seem "cheap" because some externality is outsourced or not being paid for (directly). A plastic bottle may be cheaper than a glass one if we look just at a single use, and only from production to being emptied and thrown away. If we factor in the reuse of glass bottles for example, than the plastic bottle is no longer cheaper.
The only reason to ban plastic would be because consumers behave like idiots.
That's far from the only reason, but I would argue that a lot of things are banned because people behave like idiots. A lot of laws are on the books because people behave like idiots. Sometimes you just have to accept that people will behave like idiots, and work around that.
Both regions have two common things. Poor populace and high temperatures. Former means that people buy their food and their personal hygiene items in portions for a day, or just a single meal, because they can't afford to pay for more than that. That means far more packaging for same amount of product as what you see in the Western countries.
First, smaller packages are not just some third-world phenomenon. In Switzerland, which is richer than the US, the average package size tends to be smaller than in North America since people buy less stuff in bulk for various reasons (houses and apartments are smaller, and there is less storage space; households have less people on average, etc.).
Second, while prepared foods (like sauces, pickled things and so on) and hygenic products are obviously packaged, people in poor countries do not buy individually wrapped fresh food (like fruits and vegetables), the way it's often done in the West. You will not get individually wrapped bananas (in plastic foil), the way you get them in Japan for instance (this is the pinnacle of lunacy in packaging - bananas have a natural "wrapper" already for God's sake!). Fresh food probably usually doesn't get purchased at a supermarket, but at an open-air farmer's market or whatever. So in terms of food, it's debatable whether poor countries actually have more packaging per kg of product.
Third, a lot of packaging in the West is unnecessary - it's either just stupid (the bananas in Japan), cosmetic (see-through plastic to allow you to see the product inside instead of a paper box), or anti-theft (product is small enough to fit in your pocket, so the packaging is made large enough so that it can't), etc. In poor countries, where the idea is to make things as cheap as possible, such unnecessary packaging is kept to a minimum. So again it's debatable whether you really see more packaging per volume of product than in the West.
Fourth, I've been to poor towns in Mexico where it is also hot. In the local stores, you're absolutely right - dominant package sizes are smaller than in the US or Canada. However a lot of those things (more than 50% I'd say) were actually packed in small aluminum cans and small glass bottles or jugs (canned food, sauces, that sort of thing). Bars of soap for example, they come both in individually packed in paper boxes and in plastic foil. So it isn't - and doesn't have to be - all plastic.
Latter means that food and much of hygienic products spoil rapidly unless they're sealed with air tight seals in durable packaging. No alternative packaging is as durable, as sealable and as cheap to make current state possible.
I've lived in places where it gets really hot, including inside of course, and I've never had hygienic products spoil. I've never kept them in the fridge either. Which hygienic products can spoil? Soap? Shampoo? Toothpaste? Now you say people buy things in small portions, basically single-use. So spoilage after the product is open is not really a problem, it will be used long before it has a chance to spoil. Now at the store or warehouse before opening, this is an issue of course - but I don't see why plastic packaging is the only answer? Glass and metal packaging is just as durable and just as airtight. In fact, it's better for long-term storage (plastic will leech into whatever its storing). So no, plastic is netiher the most durable nor the most sealable. It is however, probably, the cheapest, which is the main reason why it's used so much - especially in the poor countries. It's cheap however, only because the externalities - the garbage and the pollution - are not being paid for directly by the manufacturers and the consumers. If that cost was accounted for, plastic would not be the cheapest and other packaging would overtake it in like 90% of present use cases.
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And without this, much of the work that has been done on things like rise of quality of life in poor countries will see rev
You implied everything was just getting dumped, not the contaminants. Of course the contaminants are being dumped, otherwise they would not be contaminants.
There will need to be a massive cultural shift to actually get people in countries that used to export dirty plastic as "recyclable" to actually sort and wash their own plastic waste so it is actually recyclable at a reasonable cost.
It would be easier to just ban 90-95% of plastic packaging. Which I think will happen in the end. We used to live in a world without plastic packaging, when consumer goods were packaged in materials that were less damaging to the environment - glass, paper and metal. You could make the case that plastic is essential in some small number (5-10%) of today's use cases. It's not essential to have water or Coca Cola in a plastic bottle, nor to have your tomatoes pre-wrapped in plastic foil, nor to have butter in a plastic tub.
They may have cheap labor there, but I doubt they have the high tech and proper processes to handle everything cleanly and enviromental friendly way.
You don't need high tech to separate garbage. Do you use some sort of high tech when you separate garbage into recyclables, organics, and non-recyclables at home? No, just your hands (and your eyes and brain, of course). It's boring, annoying, dirty manual work. The type poor people in third-world countries will do.
You are right of course that the way the waste is handled is bad. Let's say you ship a container containing 80% recyclables and 20% contaminants to a poor Asian country...the 80% recyclables will be extracted and used. The 20% contaminants...who knows, might just get dumped somewhere. The workers, probably have lax protection (if any) from handling toxic materials, and so forth.
Basically, this is outsourcing labour from the West to Asia again. The labour of lazy Westerners who don't want to bother to separate their own garbage. Municipalities know that if you have just one bin labelled "recycling" and are pretty lax about what people put in there, than people are more likely to recycle, i.e. less recyclables end in the "regular" garbage stream that goes to a landfill. However, you get a contaminated recycling stream that someone must sift through.
Not to mention people's habit of leaving liquid inside their drinking bottles and reinstalling the caps when throwing them into the recycle bin. C'mon guys, knock that stupid ignorant shit off.
How about we just ban plastic bottles? Then figure out what do with the ones we have (how to recycle them / burn them, or whatever).
What exactly can a plastic bottle do that a glass bottle, or metal can, or some sort of paper/cardboard container cannot? I mean other than contaminate oceans for centuries. Drinks from metal and glass containers taste better than drinks from plastic ones. They are less contaminated. The only benefit is that plastic is cheap and light, so producers get to save some money and increase profit margins...well cry me a river.
Ban all plastic bottles. Now. Everywhere.
The problem isn't the actual recycling. The problem is that China accepts scrap with high levels of contaminants while nobody else does. Why? Well they were really just putting this stuff in the ground, burning it or dumping it in the ocean.
Well, no. I don't understand why everyone assumes that just because recycling was being shipped overseas then it must have been just dumped in a landfill or in the sea. The Chinese are too stupid to recycle, or what?
Yes, there was certainly some dumping going and some shady "recycling" companies in China were not really recycling everything. This however, was not the whole industry. The main reason China was accepting scrap with high levels of contaminants was that labour in China was cheap enough to have people go through it manually and separate the contanimants from the useful stuff. Yes, the contaminants (and the scrap that had become too contaminated to use) was in the end getting dumped or burned (what else can be done with it?), but only after the useful scrap was separated and actually sent for recycling.
What has changed? As China has gotten richer, labour costs have risen. If you have less people willing to work for peanuts to sort through garbage and separate the PET bottles from the used wet wipes, it's more likely the whole shipment would be dumped. Chinese authorities are not stupid...also, as China has become richer, it has started producing a lot more garbage of its own. China has enough of its own garbage to deal with, it doesn't want other people's anymore, naturally. So they said we're glad to still take your recyclables, under the condition that they are clean and ready to recycle immediately - you do your own sifting through your own garbage.
Finally, China has ambitious plans to upgrade its economy to focus on high-tech, high-wage work...this is just one piece of that puzzle, discouraging low-paying, low-tech industries.