Planet Money did a story [1] in 2020 about a US team running a very similar scheme with the same business model to get rid of R12 refrigerant in the Midwest.
It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of that episode made me so frustrated about a segment of the population. They had to lie about what they were doing because there were people who objected to the fact this was being done to protect the environment and would refuse to sell to them essentially to stick it to the environmentalists.
The degree to which not screwing up the environment has become partisan for some people is really quite depressing.
My neighbor, whose political affiliation you can guess, actively gives us shit for recycling. It is a free service where we are, and I don't bother recycling the low-value plastic crap, primarily thick dry cardboard, glass and metal, and this dude still pokes fun at it every time he sees the bin. Just the dumbest damn people.
Here's a strategy that I've found works decently with these people: frame it in terms of (1) being resourceful (2) being responsible and preserving resources for the next generation (especially their children, if they have them) (3) not being "lazy and wasteful" (you might not like that framing, but it kind of works better for that kind of personality) and (4) national sovereignty (the more wasteful we are with resources, the more we have to depend on other governments for them).
There's also a few good ones for moving away from ICEs: (1) I'd rather make things out of oil/plastic than just burn it up (2) national sovereignty and (3) resilience in case of war or disaster.
Relatedly, I don't think I've every heard an environmentalist use these points. Any idea what that is?
The best argument for EVs is putting them on the passenger seat of a Tesla Model 3 Performance, and putting the hammer down.
Stop arguing with abstract concepts, benefits for society, and dishonest framing (people are really allergic to anything they perceive as being lied to). Show the immediate, direct, tangible benefits they get.
I don't argue in FB about the environmental benefits of EVs, but rather hype immediate benefits: faster on the 0-40 times than most cars (even beating some sports cars), less maintenance, and never having to hit the gas station. Just plug in at night.
they do all the time, it doesn't work. people might be dumb but they are not dumb enough to know when they're being pandered to. they have a cultural signifier and they like it that way.
Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings.
Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work. This is the real “Inconvenient Truth.”
If you really wanna “do your part to fight climate change,” you’re better off trying to live like someone out of 1890 before plastics was a thing, and people repaired/patched 100x before even considering replacements. You’ll have less time for arguing with idiots like me online but you’ll be much happier and actually be making a positive contribution.
> Probably because in most of the US recycling is fake and it all ends up in the landfill anyway, or the amount of energy spent recycling outweighs the savings.
> Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work.
No, it's because he's an idiot whose brain is turned to mush from obsessing about culture war politics.
The plastic recycling history is vaguely interesting for some plastics and completely irrelevant for glass and metals which are profitably recycled due to the economics of recycling them vs. creating them from scratch.
In any case, the local waste plant recycles what they can and then burns the rest for energy so I'll let them make the call on what's profitable to process.
All fired silicon materials are more stable when they have been fired at least twice. If you make ceramics, you save all your failures to make grog, which is basically ceramic sand or dust. Mixed in with fresh clay it reduced the expansion ratio and the internal stresses.
Bottles with recycled material are more sturdy than those without. I don’t know how the process of bringing a bottle plant online works, but if it doesn’t include either buying grog from a supplier or feeding all the glass from the test runs into a hopper I would be very surprised.
I have never heard a physicist explain this phenomenon, but if you crush something it tends to break along the weakest points, so crushed silicon has selected out many of the weakest grains and left the strongest ones. Then either they continue to grow or they just increase the ratio of strong to weak.
There is a quickly growing movement for multi-use consumables. Its become a huge thing among the youngest complete with Instagram "influencers" peddling reusability to consumer brand companies releasing products that are meant to be "re-filled" instead of just tossing out containers and buying another. In the cities stores are popping up that specialize in selling "refills" to consumables that you come by with your own container and pay by weight.
Things such as refillable water bottles are simple examples of this as well.
Of course MAGA country is a laggard so this will probably take another 5-10 years to become adopted after it becomes the norm in the left cities->suburbs>rural.
> Of course MAGA country is a laggard so this will probably take another 5-10 years to become adopted after it becomes the norm in the left cities->suburbs>rural.
Perfect example of an unnecessary vile comment.
Most rural people already reuse and repurpose many things, they don’t have trash pick every week if at all and like to have a clean area for their children and grandchildren. It’s in their blood to find innovative ways to use something again in a different way. Your hate is coming from somewhere gross and you should consider some introspection on why you have so much of it in your heart.
It was necessary to me, thats why I made it. Whether or not you consider it necessary has no bearing on me. Just downvote and move on.
>Most rural people already reuse and repurpose many things, they don’t have trash pick every week if at all and like to have a clean area for their children and grandchildren.
I think you are not descriptive enough when it comes to the term rural. I specifically said MAGA country. That does not encompass all of rural.
And to be clear, my point with "left cities->suburbs>rural" was to indicate that the concept of "stores that sell refills" as a concept is still a niche idea (in the US). It will begin in the cities and then once it becomes the norm there, it will expand to the suburbs and eventually become the norm in rural as well.
You saw this same concept in the adoption curve of many things such as electricity, internet access and well, even single use plastics (The rural areas were the last to ditch the milk man)
I’m saying you’re a hate-filled person and suggesting you investigate that hate with some introspection instead of spewing and spreading it.
Again, this comment is filled with vitriol and hostility. This is not a healthy way to live, I strongly encourage you to seek outside council on how to process these destructive feelings.
In the third world and perhaps depending on your income levels, all containers are refillable. we used to take Coca Coca bottles as water bottles to schools, the same for years. I think they would be usually thrown out.
Yeah you are right, this is not a new idea. In fact even in the US it used to be the norm. (ie. The Milk man making a milk delivery and you leave your old bottles out for him to collect and reuse).
The plastics era is slowly ending and being replaced by ideas that used to work fine.
The symbols we've come to associate with plastics being recyclable actually just indicate the material composition. And it isn't by accident that we assume that symbol means it's recyclable either.
Plastics like PET and HDPE are recyclable but sorting recyclable materials from non-recyclable ones is costly which meant a lot of recycling does end up as waste.
We need to start penalizing manufacturers and retailers for single-use plastics. Laws like those passed in Maine banned most single-use plastic bags and mandates that anyone offering them must also provide recycling a drop off bin.
Consumers mostly do not have a choice about how their products are packaged so the onus must be shifted onto retailers and manufacturers who make those decisions.
There is when the city is getting paid for the recycled material.
In fact some cities offset the price of trash service with the money from recycling. Which is part of the impetus to fine people for not separating. You’re costing the city money.
From what i've read, aluminum is about the only thing that is remotely valuable, and can deposits tend take care of that. Paper and glass especially are EV negative, and composting a la NYC is yuppie feel good nonsense.
Composting is bullshit until we’ve mandated that produce stickers be fully biodegradable. Nothing put me off city compost like finding microplastics everywhere in the pile.
They might be less stubborn if you were less condescending and spent more time actually trying to come up with good arguments to convince them. pretty clear that being arrogant never changes anyone's mind. inclined to believe that you don't actually care about convincing, just judging
Funny, I've been able to convince some of my conservative friends and family to recycle and change their minds on some conservation issues. maybe, like I suggested, the problem is that you're doing it wrong
I have convinced one or two to think differently, on one or two subjects, after them knowing me for long enough to not assume I'm some leather-chewing CNN puppet. I finally got my dad to say that "no one should die from lack of healthcare because they're poor" and that "the act of being a billionaire implies unethical behavior". But he doesn't think the government should do anything about any of it, all the Democrats are evil and corrupt, and Trump is the best president of the past 120 years.
Another relative, after one of the recent shootings, said there was nothing we can do about gun violence. I immediately named off a few modest proposals that don't involve mass registration or confiscation, and he immediately said "yeah those don't sound bad".
Both my parents were conservatives for a long time, but were not angry, bitter, finger-pointing people about it until they had a traumatic event happen, AND a black Democrat became president, AND they got access to high speed internet and Fox News in the same year - 2008.
Now they watch four+ hours of Fox propaganda per day, my mother more because she goes onto bona-fide hate and misinformation sites and prints out articles on how Ukraine is the hub for US bioweapons labs and World Order money laundering because Ukraine is literally the most corrupt government in the world. With bylines of made up names, whose biographies are empty when you click the hyperlink. But that is more trustworthy than the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, or gasp NPR.
I've had experience in these conversations. I know that the approach is to get them talking about what matters to them first, and find common ground. Believe me, I'm not "doing it wrong".
Doing it, even doing it correctly, is exhausting, full stop.
As I recall it wasn't "to stick it to the environmentalists", it was simply preservationist thinking. They didn't want something they saw as scarce & useful destroyed, the same way you might prefer to sell your old laptop to someone who will appreciate it and re-use it vs someone who wants to melt it.
There was a lot of overlap between people with each of those opinions. My recollection is the same as yours, though - the motivation was more preservation and the idea that "the good stuff" was now a limited resource that could never be replaced.
Part of the reason for this is that environmentalists optimize for the most visible (annoying) measures, not the most effective one. That goes so far as to ask people to sort recycling from trash 'to raise awareness' even when it all gets mixed together anyways.
Straws and plastic bags in developed countries with working waste disposal systems are another example. Each time someone pulls a half-dissolved paper straw out of their drink, you've just made a person that is less willing to support environmental measures.
Probably because any "skepticism" about climate change (no matter how reasonable) is basically taboo (cancelable offense) which triggers knee-jerk opposition in reactionary/contrarian types.
Happens with other topics, like transgender treatment for kids.
It's also amplified by the humiliation many kids experience when struggling in school systems. Causes a general distaste for reason and science because, in a very real way, it hurt them as a child. Not actually science and reason itself, but people pushing it and claiming to represent it.
You are wrong on the facts about all of these, which is impressive in its own way, but just to focus in on one:
Burning plastic isn’t better for the environment than recycling. It is better than landfill, assuming you're using the heat to displace fossil fuels though.
You can check out the waste hierarchy on wikipedia if you care about being well informed about stuff:
No, I am not wrong. That's what's sad about this. People actually believe in all these things, not realizing they don't help the environment. And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
Go read a study on the energy and water costs of recycling plastic. But I'll give you a quick summary:
Plastic has two energy components. The energy embodied in it because it's flammable, and the energy to manufacture it.
It takes more energy to recycle plastic, than it does to manufacture it. So why do people want to recycle it? Because they want to recover the energy embodied in it!
But if you burn it, you get that energy back, AND you got to use the plastic for some productive purpose. And since recycling it takes more energy than manufacturing it new, burning plastic is always better than recycling it.
Here's a meta review of Life Cycle Analysis that says otherwise.
Different countries, different methodologies, different assumptions but recycling being better than burning which is in turn better than landfill across a range of environmental impacts is fairly consistent.
> Overall, this review found that for all the studies which aiming to compare waste treatment
technologies, mechanical recycling comes out as the environmentally preferable option in
most cases
Hopefully this:
> And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
also applies to you finding out that you've been lied to by people who have a vested interest in generating exactly that backlash against environmentalist.
That study is making the exact same error I already mentioned: They are counting the embodied energy of the flammable plastic as GWP, while not discounting the energy saved by burning the plastic instead of some other fuel.
They literally cite that as the benefit it provides over landfill. All of the studies, that this is a meta review of, do that. It's just a fact that it releases CO2.
> Similar discretion is needed while comparing the results obtained for the WTE [waste to energy] option
by the four studies. It is known that the incineration process emits greenhouse gases,
but it also generates thermal energy and electricity which can be used as an alternative
to fossil fuel consumption. However, the results indicate that overall, the WTE option
contributes adversely towards the global warming problem, with all high positive impact
values between 50% and 100%. However, all four studies indicated a negative impact value
for AP, indicating that the incineration process is advantageous in reducing the impact of
acidification, making it the second most environmentally friendly method of disposal, and
suitable for disposal of the residues discarded by the MRF process.
The key point being, if you can get your heat or electricity from a non-fossil source, then it's preferable to do so. Because releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is bad for climate change.
But luckily for WTE, the are other aspects that make landfill even worse. Still not as good as recycling, just like all those environmentalists have been saying, correctly, for years. How boringly non-contrarian of them.
That paragraph you quoted is logically inconsistent. I mean think about it - if you are substituting other oil for this plastic, how in the world can your plastic have "100%" GWP?
That would imply they somehow manage to emit double the CO2 that the plastic actually contains. Or they burn it and don't capture any energy at all, so there is no substitution taking place.
And the negative GWP for recycling? That's impossible. Recycling something does not remove CO2 from the air - rather it costs CO2 to do the recycling. I suspect they are subtracting the embodied energy of the plastic to get that figure, which is dishonest.
Sorry, but this "study" is worthless. But it's an excellent example of the sorry state of environmentalism.
29 published Life Cycle Analysis papers from different authors in different reputable journals in different countries all got confused about this, then the meta review that talks in detail about the different assumptions they all made also missed this?
That seems unlikely.
I've never even seen this specific meta review before, I just knew that's what they all said and grabbed the first link I found to a recent one. Feel free to check others, they will all broadly agree because this is fairly boring stuff.
Welcome to the club. Yah, that is the current state of environmental research. It's just junk.
This is why I started this thread with "Because environmentalists have a truly terrible track record.". And this is also why so many people are so distrustful of what "experts" say about this topic.
Environmental research is so dependent on assumptions it's basically impossible to do it honestly. Usually an author will have a goal in mind, then write a paper to reach that goal, and he'll have no trouble doing so - just change an assumption here or there, and you'll be successful.
If you want a way to cut through the nonsense just follow the money: Resources cost money, the method that is cheapest, to a rough approximation, is the one that uses the fewest resources.
Plastic straws take FAR FAR FAR less energy than metal ones - don't forget the hot water to wash the metal one. Paper straws are usually coated with stuff, the paper takes more energy that plastic, and the coating doesn't break down - so you don't even get the compost.
So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Plastic bags are good for litter, but you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better. Not to mention people reuse around half of them for garbage bags, so if you ban them, people still need to buy them.
> So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Only if you're using resistive heating. Heat pumps run on natural-gas-produced electricity can be at least as efficient as direct natural gas combustion for heating, and they automatically transition to cleaner sources of energy as the grid does.
> you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better
I understand that this is the case for cotton bags, IIRC due to high water use in cotton production, but for other types of reusable bags the threshold is lower.
> people reuse around half of them for garbage bags
This estimate seems like it's significantly too high. I do most of my grocery shopping at places that don't provide free plastic bags, and yet I still end up with far more single-use plastic bags than I could ever use for garbage. I would guess that no more than 10% of single-use bags actually get reused for trash.
Heat pumps work fine for home heat, but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer. Heat pump do not work well for those applications - I considered buying them and checked into it.
Your oven also uses resistive heat. Induction can work well, but is underpowered if you are cooking more than 3 or 4 things at once (especially if you also use the oven). You need around double the electric service most homes run to the range (there is no standardized plug for it).
Induction is only a replacement for causal cooks, people who make full course large meals will not be happy with it.
It sounds like(yet again) another US only problem. My induction hob here in UK is wired to run at 7.2kW and the last thing I would describe it as is "underpowered" - even with all rings turned on at max power, things will burn instantly. It's a vast vast improvement over a gas range, wouldn't be without it.
>>but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer.
I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
>> Heat pump do not work well for those applications
What's wrong with heat pump dryers? They are awesome, as long as you aren't putting them in an unheated space like a garage. They use much less energy than condenser dryers and considerably less than vented ones, while being pretty quick.
Ranges in the US can be wired for 50A * 240v * 80% = 9.6kW, and no, that's not enough. Cheaper homes have 30A for the range which is I guess what you have.
> like(yet again) another US only problem
I don't think Europeans realize how they sound when they say stuff like that. Especially when your stove would be considered low end in the US.
A good stove is around 5 kW, and each burner is 2.5kW = 15kW to run everything at once - basically double the service you have. Unless you want to wire the range and stove separately (which might be an option).
> I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
Obviously it's a thing, otherwise why would I say it? Is this a European thing not to have them?
Gas dryers cost a bit more to buy (15% more maybe), but much much less to operate (half to be exact). If you have gas service in your home and you buy your own appliances you'll almost always pick that.
> What's wrong with heat pump dryers?
They are very expensive, and save about half the electricity - but gas dryers also save about half the energy, so there's no point in going for the heat pump.
Even if you have no gas service, they cost around double a non heat pump, and it would take 10 years to recoup the money. It's not worth it - all you are doing is generating emissions in the dryer factory instead of your house.
Environmentally the gas dryer is better, at least as long as we still burn gas to generate electricity.
And don't forget the heat pump dryer takes much longer to dry clothing - at least for my house the dryer is always the bottleneck for laundry, I would never buy one that takes longer!
Yes, natural gas dryers are semi-common in homes that have natural gas service where I live (Minnesota) due to the fact that it costs about half as much to operate a gas-fired dryer vs an electric one.
Nearly everyone has gas furnaces here in MN since it’s significantly cheaper to heat with natural gas in the US, and it gets very cold here.
As a frustrated environmentalist myself. I would just like to say, burning or not burning natural gas for heating is dependent on a lot of factors. But the GP is generally right in most of the US because the energy is already coming from coal or natural gas. Both of which are back of the envelope about 50% efficient at converting heat from the burnt coal/gas to electricity. Add in the transmission and distribution loss (aka step up/down transformers, increasing distances to the electric plant as they are moved farther outside of cities/etc) and its another ~5-10% loss, and then the final conversion assuming a heat pump has a 50% gain. So its roughly a wash, and the actual gain/loss is dependent on electric mix (nuke+hydro), how cold it is outside (heat pumps for heating get really inefficient as the temps drop until they are basically restive heating, which many switch to after a certain point to avoid just burning up the compressor).
There are similar problems around wind/solar, which tend to just be green washing natural gas peaker plants, many of which aren't even combined cycle. So the easy back of the envelope here is, that if your not getting ~50% of your power from a nuke its likely that burning the gas in your house is more CO2 friendly (the places with lots of hydro also have nukes, so 1rst order approximation).
And the plastic bag thing, is again feel good because those bags both have a very short time to degrade (despite all the environmentalist misleading people into thinking they last decades, which is true when they are buried in a landfill, but that isn't the case they then talk about which is finding them in the open environment where UV destroys them in a few months to a couple years).
The plastic drink bottles though? Those are much more robust, but just about no one banned them in favor of recreating the commercial bottle washing systems we had before and that exist in mexico/etc. But again, one had to be very careful about total system costs, which is how we get back to nukes. We have to shift the energy curve away from CO2 sources, and the only way to really do that is to find a significantly more energy dense mechanism. And we have one, which is somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million times as dense per Kg and instead of arguing about the CO2 being emitted to move or manufacture things, we could basically zero it out with 40 year old technology and likely gain another order of magnitude of efficiency if we built energy systems with modern technology that actually burnt the entire fuel load rather than calling it "waste".
Most environmentalist are just as uninformed as the climate deniers, which is why we are stuck.
PS: once you start to understand much of the above you can also see how premium electric cars can frequently be worse for the climate than econobox gas. The numerical systemwide advantage isn't so overwhelming to wipe out the disadvantages in places that get a lot of power from coal.
Arguing for natural gas heating is dumb. The only way to hit net-zero is electrification AND renewable electricity generation. Both will take decades. The only question is whether to do them sequentially or in parallel, and it is pretty obvious which will get us to net zero faster.
Emitting a bit more carbon now is worth it if we can significantly reduce emissions long term
The reality is that most environmentalists don't care about the environment, they just care about making people miserable. I joined some environmentalist forums because I cared only to realize how misanthropic most of them were, and they did not care at all about reality.
This is one of my favorite things about permaculture. It’s turning gardeners into conservationists, not conservationists into gardeners. If you don’t already like plants it’s too involved (intellectually and sometimes physically) of a hobby/cause to get into it just so you can lambast people.
The glaring exception to this is that we absolutely are all coming after your lawn, and that’s such a hot button issue for people.
are lawns really such a problem? I see an ecosystem next to my front door as a risk. Lawns are easily managed, they provide line of sight across my property to the street, it's hard for wild animals to nest next to where i, and my future children, need to walk every day. I really dont see it as a problem.
on the flipside, the greater back half of my yard not near the house i encourage to be an ecosystem. If everyone on the block did so, then the entire middle of the block would be a continuous piece of nature. Front lawns create scattered pockets of nature at best and seem to cause a lot of friction.
I think of the Geese all around the industrial park near me, and how going into and out of your office on the sidewalk can become a problem if theres a mother goose around who thinks youre threatening her family
Some substantial fraction of all pesticide and fertilizer release into waterways comes from cities not farms. Also a huge part of the non agricultural water supply goes to lawns. So while I empathize with the people who say that asking residents to stop watering their lawns to conserve water, but we don't do that for farmers, that's still quite an impactful action from the perspective of the city's water supply.
The farmer is filling up a tank or hopper with hundreds or thousands of pounds of chemicals that cost them a ton of money so they can't really afford to have it just sitting around. They know when they fertilize right before a rainstorm just how much money they lost. The feedback is pretty immediate. Some people would say this is sufficient to prevent problems, but we know that's not true. It discourages problems, but it doesn't prevent them.
Meanwhile your neighbor has a $10 container they bought last year and they'll need a new one next year even if they didn't use it, so who cares if I fertilize and forget to turn off the sprinklers? Hardly any discouragement at all. It's very open loop.
I wasnt thinking about the water supply, the dangers there makes sense. The fertilizer issue seems tangential. We can ban / limit the sue of fertilizer without telling people they cant have lawns.
What's the alternative? without a lawn people will likely opt to concrete their property - which I guess would be better for water but kind of depressing
IMO, most lawns are fake and not actually comprised of native species, which is where the waste and pollution comes in. A person in Arizona or California can xeriscape using native cactii etc. or they can put in a St. Augustine lawn - it seems to me that the former would be easier to manage with less waste than the latter.
Do you have any good resources for lawn-free land management? I'm moving to Appalachia and will have an acre of creekside lawn I'd love to replace with something more sustainable/productive. And I'm a big gardener already.
I’ve noticed this too. There’s a certain religious fervor to it, where the only acceptable options to address a threat to the environment must involve some pain or cost. Solutions that increase abundance, or don’t require suffering, are at best suspect at worst unspeakable.
Is it more feasible in less expensive countries? I'd imagine you could pay a tech in Indonesia considerably less than in the Midwest and they'd still consider it a good deal (assuming funding levels are comparable).
I suspect part of it is just lack of knowledge; if someone showed up at your front door offering you money for some random item in your garage you'd be tempted to politely decline; because if someone is going out of their way to offer you cash, it's probably worth more than they're offering.
From the NPR story, it sounds like the business is ultimately constrained by customer acquisition costs and being in the US might actually be an advantage since the digital advertising market is more mature.
In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
You seem to not understand the point of an interview. It's not a quiz where you get a mark at the end and the best marks get the job. It's a series of intentionally constructed questions to help talk through someone's thinking and process in order to understand if they would be a good fit. The actual answer at the end is largely irrelevant.
My point with saying "almost all wrong" is that this is one of the questions where you have like, 50 different ideas that seem like they could work and wouldn't work if tried when you try it and maybe 1 or 2 actual strategies, not a question where you have 30 different things that all work with different pros and cons and you need to compare between them.
But you said yourself that you don't know what will work and what won't.
You say that the answer at the end is largely irrelevant, but then claim that there is only a couple of good solutions in the problem space, implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
Either your position is not coherent, or there is a communication deficit here.
> implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
No, you're implying that.
Definitionally, I don't know the answer to the question. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be interviewing you, I'd be off making millions buying R12. And if you knew the answer, you should be off making millions buying R12 instead of interviewing here. That's clear to everyone at the start of the interview.
You seem to be attaching a moral valence to the word wrong, that people are somehow failures if they come up with the wrong answer to a question. The opposite is true, most of the things we try in life are wrong, we try something, it doesn't work, we learn from it and we try again.
edit: The reason why I think it's a good interview question for marketing people is because it's a business that seems like, if the customer acquisition piece is figured out, the rest of the business is relatively trivial. But empirically, it's not a common business so the customer acq piece must be pretty hard to figure out. At the same time, it seems like there's at least a few businesses so it also doesn't seem like it's impossible to figure out.
If I hire you, I'm going to constantly be asking you to do things that, as far as you're aware, you're the first person in the world to have ever done. If I'm asking you to do it, it means I don't know if it can be done or not, I don't know the "right" answer to the problem. Most of the time, the answer back is that the thing I want done looks impossible and probably isn't worth pursuing which is a great answer in the context of a job but not very illuminating in the context of an interview.
This question looks that hard but there's also a proof point that it can be done which means you can't give a "this isn't possible" as an out and are forced to explore deeper into how someone could actually do it. At the same time, it's a question with relatively little context which means I can explain all the relevant facts in the span of an interview.
That's why I think it's a potentially great interview question. It's not designed as a trick brainteaser for you to figure out the answer. It's designed for you to exercise the same parts of your brain as you would when I come to you with any other crazy request that probably can't be done.
My guess is they're missing large demographics, hispanics that scrap metal. I'd imagine if they took effort to do campaigns in Spanish, Polish and Chinese, they'd have a lot better luck.
Chinese companies have historically violated bans on making banned gasses, but other countries have detected this. After that, the Chinese government has actually cracked down on them and eliminated those emissions. They worked with international groups to find the violators and then raided and even demolished illegal factories: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2021/02/10/study-suggests-...
China's policy of responding only when they are caught is broad and applies to a wide variety of violations. The problem is, they also make it very hard to police China. This is deliberate.
The 1-2% that get caught and punished are acceptable breakage from the broader picture.
The fact that levels have fallen dramatically since this operation shows that much more than 1-2% are being caught. Not trying to defend the Chinese government as a whole, but on GHGs specifically they are doing more than many other countries to curb emissions.
Absolutely there is someone somewhere in China who has built an R-12 plant with a high end capture system for escaping volatiles and a weird ventilation system that gets past the satellite imaging.
It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think.
[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/917060248