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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Wasn't there a scheme to build reefs with them?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The compacted tyres have arrived in a third world country. In theory, it is win/win. The tyres are recycled, some useful economic activity has been transferred from rich to poor.
| Except for a fairly obvious flaw. |
If it is a useful economic activity, it would be done in the first world country. Recycling compacted tyres is a mechanised operation, there is little or no advantage in it being done in a third world country.
| Unless the process can be done in two ways: (1) properly and expensively (2) improperly and cheaply. |
Then the third world country has an 'advantage' -- a lack of the kind of elaborate legal and social infrastructures that prevent people doing things 'improperly and cheaply'.
And that is what happens to British tyres in India. They end up creating black moonscapes (the black of the rubber and the black of the oils within the rubber). The tyres have not been recycled, they have been turned into (just) profitable garbage.
| But of course all this is illegal in the first world country under a whole raft of international and domestic conventions! What to do? |
India maintains a few legal (but uncompetitive) plants for recycling compacted tyres. Ten percent of the British tyres go to them, ninety percent go off to the illegal ones. When you ask the British government what has happened to your old tyres, the British ask the Indians, the Indians tell the British they have gone to the legal plants, the British government tells you they have gone to the legal plants, you say, "Jolly good. That's one less thing to worry about."
We will wrap this up by showing how this relatively trivial trade illustrates why recycling must be made illegal.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| "I am shocked. We never had proof before." Peter Taylor, spokesperson for the UK tyre recovery service. |
Since this has all been known -- and reported to the authorities -- for many years, he is either lying or the situation is even worse than I thought. 'Careful ignoral' hardly does justice to it.
Remember, this has all come about because
(a) the disposal of used tyres is a problem
(b) recycling the tyres is held to be the solution to that problem
(c) there is formal machinery of some sophistication to recycle tyres
(d) it has never worked
(e) not even nearly
(f) it has produced a situation that is (arguably) worse than if nothing at all had been done
(g) yet nothing, with great determination, has been done about it.
| So let's start by following my advice and banning the recycling of tyres. |
That means every time your tyres are changed, there is
(i) you
(ii) a garage person and
(iii) some tyres that require disposal.
(i) you
(ii) the garage person
(iii) the old tyre manufacturer
(iv) the new tyre manufacturer or
(v) some governmental agency?
It is certainly practical for any or some combination of i, ii, iii, iv to provide the money for (v) to do the disposing. Since the whole nation benefits from tyres it is also practical for (v) to use general taxation. To do what?
| It's a garbage disposal problem. |
They are either burnt in a properly designed incinerator to produce energy or buried in landfill, with or without shredding etc. It's not a big problem. Once all thoughts of recycling are shredded.
| But this solution will never be adopted. |
Why not? Because it would be considered
(a) a waste of a splendid resource and
(b) a confession of failure.
So some other scheme will be adopted. Presumably
* all tyres will be mandatorily removed by government approved collectors
* taken to government-approved recycling plants in the UK
* to produce mountains and mountains of rubber crumb.
Not only was this the starting point of the whole problem last time round but it will cost an arm and a leg this time round because there won't be the cheap get-outs. When something of small value is produced at great cost and it is done on a countrywide scale but it's something no-one particularly cares about, what do you suppose will happen?
1. It works. We have spent a lot of money quite needlessly solving a not very important problem.
2. It doesn't work because someone, somewhere thinks up a wheeze when presented with a situation on a platter, just like last time.
| Recycling is the gift that never stops giving. Though not to the world. | |
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Grant
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Cleanest way to dispose of these tyres is to dump them in a deep part of the ocean. Deepest part of North Sea is about 700 metres down.
Drop them there and you'll never see them again. And the fish will love the artificial reef you've just created
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So we say now. We keep saying such things only to discover later it was the very worst thing we could do. E.g.
| Let's make plastic that breaks down naturally so we don't have unsightly plastic bags littering the place. |
And now we have oceans and oceans of deadly plastic shards we can never get rid of. I hold to the view that all waste should be treated like nuclear waste:
| Bury it very carefully but make sure we do it in a reversible way. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I should like to codify my antipathy to the entire 'recycling movement' so this my be a little discursive.
There is nothing new about recycling, it goes back well beyond Steptoe & Son. But consider: it has always been firmly associated with the poor, the marginal and the criminal. This is because of its very nature. It seeks to make something new, not out raw materials selected for the purpose, but out of something that is old, not selected for the purpose but because it is 'free', i.e. waste.
Until the Green Movement got going, recycling just wasn't thought about. It impinged on the public mind only when a scrap metal merchant was on trial for anything from fencing church roof lead to being head of the country's worst crime family (the Richardsons). In other words, in other times, recycling just didn't exist save in the most recherché economic corners of society.
So what triggered the rise of recycling from carefully ignored universal obscurity to being minorly obsessive for middle class families and international governmental shindigs?
more/
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | I hold to the view that all waste should be treated like nuclear waste:
| Bury it very carefully but make sure we do it in a reversible way. | |
Your wish is Sellafield's command.
| The government says it will dispose of its 140 tonnes of radioactive plutonium - currently stored at a secure facility at Sellafield in Cumbria. |
This is no ordinary stockpile, it's the world's largest.
| The UK has the world's largest stockpile of the hazardous material, which is a product of nuclear fuel reprocessing. |
But, but ... couldn't we do something useful with it? Like new nuclear power stations?
| It has been kept at the site and has been piling up for decades in a form that would allow it to be recycled into new nuclear fuel. But the government has now decided that it will not be reused and instead says it wants to put the hazardous material "beyond reach" and made ready for permanent disposal deep underground. |
No we won't. No new nuclear power stations.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A good argument but starting from a time long, long ago. When nuclear-generated electricity would be 'too cheap to need metering'. But the wider point is true: We can only do what we know and what we know is never enough.
| No new nuclear power stations. |
I think we have to accept this--at least until fusion/not fission becomes feasible. Though we should work existing ones until their pips squeak.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Though we should work existing ones until their pips squeak. |
In normal business accounting, that's called "Sweating The Assets". Work them until the wheels fall off and/or they fall apart.
Not sure that's a good idea with nuclear power stations though. What could possibly go wrong?
{Insert here an appropriately-sized image}
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I was thinking mainly about the German ones, closed prematurely because of a combination of Greens and Fukushima. But speaking of things going wrong we have a whole tranche of Ukrainian ones to think about now. When I say 'Ukrainian', I include of course 'Russian' and/or 'American', depending on the peace settlement.
| Now available: sound nuclear power station, slightly shelled. All serious offers considered. |
But to your point, I think I would be right in saying there is no correlation between 'age of facility' and 'things going wrong'. Though I suppose you would be right to say, 'We haven't exactly got a long history to go on.'
N.B. We could ask the French to provide base load nuclear power for the whole of western Europe.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | But to your point, I think I would be right in saying there is no correlation between 'age of facility' and 'things going wrong'. |
I take it you've never owned a Classic Car then? Which regularly costs more to repair and patch-up than it would cost to build a new one.
With classic cars, it's usually a sentimental attachment to something old. I'm not sure there will ever be a Classic Power Stations collectors club, or a magazine of the same name.
Just replace "sentimental attachment" with the "sunk cost fallacy".
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is not unimportant. The biggest costs of new nukes is (a) persuading people to have one in their backyard and (b) disposing of them after their useful life. With existing ones these either do not apply or already apply. I would think this should outweigh the 'costs more to repair and patch-up than it would cost to build a new one' factor.
'The sunk cost fallacy' (a new one on me, by the way) might not apply.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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The sunk cost fallacy should be in the AEL collector's club of Top Ten Logical Fallacies.
| The sunk cost fallacy is a cognitive bias that makes you feel as if you should continue pouring money, time, or effort into a situation since you’ve already "sunk" so much into it already. This perceived sunk cost makes it difficult to walk away from the situation since you don’t want to see your resources wasted. |
and
| The sunk cost fallacy causes people to stick with a failing decision just because they've already invested in it. Psychological biases like loss aversion and commitment bias make it hard to walk away from sunk costs, even when it is clear you should. |
Government defence contracts are classic case studies. And top of that steaming pile would be Nimrod.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This might be relevant to building new nuclear power stations--both Sizewell C and Hinkley Point C come into this category--but not when it comes to flogging existing ones to death. Curiously, their carbon-free constant output has become more rather than less important as time goes by.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Although I've stopped posting on Medium I decided my tyre thingy (above) was worth bringing to the world's attention. It has failed in this intention, both with the world and with my immediate circle, so I'll post up the version as it appeared and then discuss why it requires wider attention. [Not my story, the general phenomenon.]
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Drive a car, do you? April 14th 2025
You’d better read this then.
Whenever I say recycling should be made a criminal offence, people think I’m joking. When I say I’m perfectly serious, they still think I’m joking. When I insist for a third time, they walk away shaking their heads. ‘That Mick, the things he’ll say to get a laugh.’
| This is because recycling has attained ‘apple pie’ status. If I ever tell you apple pie ought to be criminalised, I’ll be joking. |
Although you won’t be converted, I can create a mild unease by describing what happens when it is time to change your tyres. About every five years for the average car. You may think tyres are posterchilds for recycling:
* They are homogenous (all rubber, aside from a bit of metal bracing and some chemicals).
* They are easy to collect. The bloke putting on the new tyres takes the old ones away. No wheelie bins, no trips to the recycling centre.
* They are straightforward to deal with. They get shredded in a giant… er… shredder.
* The end product, ‘rubber crumb’, is endlessly useful for playgrounds, sportsfields, road underlay, all sorts.
* There is a sophisticated infrastructure for achieving the above.
It costs more to recycle tyres than playgrounds, sports fields et al are prepared to pay so, somewhere along the line, money has to change hands. Otherwise no-one would recycle tyres. In Britain (but it’s much the same everywhere in the the developed world) the government levies three pounds for each of your outworn tyres.
| Cheap at the price! You love doing your bit for the planet when it costs you twelve sovs, top dollar, once every five years. |
Just give the money to the nice gentleman in the overalls and he’ll write everything down on an official form so you can drive off on your new Michelin radials with a song in your heart and not a care in the world.
He (it could be a she but you’ll find that’s mostly propaganda) will put your old ones in a big pile ready to be collected by your local, officially registered, tyre recycling plant. There’s no call for cowboys in this business.
| There’s not a lot of call for rubber crumb either. Not at three pounds a tyre. |
So only about ten percent of your local officially registered tyre recycling plants recycle tyres. Just enough to show willing. The other ninety per cent ‘compact’ the tyres, put them in containers and ship them off to licensed compact tyre recyclers. I say ‘shipped off’ because there is even less money in compacted tyres than in whole ones so it is only economic to do anything with them in third world countries.
| What happens when the container arrives? |
The compacted tyres, having arrived in India if they are ye olde British tyres, are offloaded and driven straight to an official Indian-registered compacted tyre recycling plant.
| Except for one fairly obvious flaw. |
Recycling compacted tyres is a wholly mechanised operation, there is no advantage in it being done in a third world country. It could have been done cheaper in Britain and without the ten thousand ship-miles. So
* after all the forms have been filled in and sent to the Department of the Environment in London, with all the boxes ticked
* after the customary ten percent of compacted rubber tyre has been offloaded and recycled to show India’s signed up to saving the planet too
* after the other ninety per cent has been taken another thousand miles to nameless, unregistered, moonscapes of desperate people living in pools of black gunk composed of bits of old tyre, bits of old tyre oil and bits of old rubber that can be made into something even more desperate people are prepared to pay for
| Your tyres have been recycled. |
Now you may not know about any of this but everyone in the tyre recycling business knows about it because it has been going on for years and is regularly brought to the attention of anyone who cares to know. Which is not everyone. I heard this on the BBC last week, so it must be true
| “I am shocked. We never had proof before.” Peter Taylor, spokesperson for the UK tyre recovery service. |
So it will be ‘action this day’, right? Not quite yet. It is not so much that this is the only way known to Man that tyres can be recycled with even a semblance of utility, it is something else entirely...
| The whole thing is illegal under all kinds of international agreements freely entered into by successive British and Indian governments, so if they are going to do anything about it they will first have to say |
“We’re awfully sorry, we’ve been conniving scumbags for as long as anyone can remember. But for a very good reason. Unless you are prepared to pay a king’s ransom every time you change your tyres so we can take them off to British plants to turn them into British rubber crumb that no-one will pay more than peanuts for, we are going to have to put those tyres into landfill and you won’t tolerate that, will you, you and your stupid childish beliefs in the virtues of recycling. So just shut the fuck up while we carry on being conniving scumbags on your behalf. Deal?”
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