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Recycling Is Dying
HughPickens.com writes: Aaron C. Davis writes in the Washington Post that recycling, once a profitable business for cities and private employers alike, has become a money-sucking enterprise. Almost every recycling facility in the country is running in the red and recyclers say that more than 2,000 municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around. "If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly — then we are talking about a nationwide crisis," says David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation's largest recycler.
The problem with recylcing is that a storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide. Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperiling the economics of the whole system. "We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free," says Bill Moore. "It's never really been free, and in fact, it's getting more expensive."
One big problem is that China doesn't want to buy our garbage anymore. In the past China had sent so many consumer goods to the United States that all the shipping containers were coming back empty. So US companies began stuffing the return-trip containers with recycled cardboard boxes, waste paper and other scrap. China could, in turn, harvest the raw materials. Everyone won. But China has launched "Operation Green Fence" — a policy to prohibit the import of unwashed post-consumer plastics and other "contaminated" waste shipments. In China, containerboard, a common packaging product from recycled American paper, is trading at just over $400 a metric ton, down from nearly $1,000 in 2010. China also needs less recycled newsprint; the last paper mill in Shanghai closed this year. "If the materials we are exporting are so contaminated that they are being rejected by those we sell to," says Valerie Androutsopoulos, "maybe it's time to take another look at dual stream recycling."
The problem with recylcing is that a storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide. Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperiling the economics of the whole system. "We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free," says Bill Moore. "It's never really been free, and in fact, it's getting more expensive."
One big problem is that China doesn't want to buy our garbage anymore. In the past China had sent so many consumer goods to the United States that all the shipping containers were coming back empty. So US companies began stuffing the return-trip containers with recycled cardboard boxes, waste paper and other scrap. China could, in turn, harvest the raw materials. Everyone won. But China has launched "Operation Green Fence" — a policy to prohibit the import of unwashed post-consumer plastics and other "contaminated" waste shipments. In China, containerboard, a common packaging product from recycled American paper, is trading at just over $400 a metric ton, down from nearly $1,000 in 2010. China also needs less recycled newsprint; the last paper mill in Shanghai closed this year. "If the materials we are exporting are so contaminated that they are being rejected by those we sell to," says Valerie Androutsopoulos, "maybe it's time to take another look at dual stream recycling."
Shh dont try and make sense the eco warriors will get you. Hartford, CT is a bit of the poster child for this, they separate out what they can automaticly and burn the rest for electricity.
No sir I dont like it.
Toxic inks? All food packaging is made with food-safe inks, usually made from vegetable oils. Newspapers (remember them?) have been using low toxicity inks for years. Most corrugated packaging (cartons) are printed with inks similar to food inks.
I agree. It seems like the big problem is "single stream". I had never even heard of "single stream" until this article.
It's not much of a problem. I live in Southwark which is a single stream system. The Southwark Waste Management Facility is open one weekend per year and is well worth a visit if you like building sized machines.
They went for single stream for various reasons, an important one being that in deepest, darkest London, space for storing stuff until the dustbin lorry visits is limited so people don't do it.
Basically, the mixed recyclables come in and get put into a giant machine to sort the waste with an effectiveness of over 95%. It first goes under a huge hooked wire brush bag splitter. It then goes over very coarse interleavced rollers which removes the large sheets of cardboard. It then goes over finer meshing things which catch and crush glass to sort that out. Then comes the big magnet for steel. Then there's a pulsed magnet rollers which uses magnetic induction to fire off the aluminium into a hopper. That leaves mixed paper and plastic. This then goes past a multispectral laser clasification system which triggers a very powerful air puffer to sort out the paper and plastic.
The sorted waste then goes past a small army of people who manually identify and remove any further errors. This gets it up to over 99.9%.
It's then baled up into huge bales of aluminium, steel, paper and mixed plastic (glass doesn't bale) which is then sent off to various places for further processing.
The facility is running slightly in the red in that the sales don't cover the running costs, but not by a large margin. That's pretty good because with a relatively small outlay of cost to run it, there's a huge amount not being landfilled.
If you live in London or are in there when it's open, go and visit.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Many towns do just a that. You pay a little extra tax and the town has weekly pickup as well as arranging days to pick up other things like furniture or electronics. You find it in towns that are generally clean and cared for.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Why would you throw away glass? It's easy to recycle that.
A good cost analysis is never difficult.
Speaking as a certified accountant I could not disagree more. If you think cost analysis "is never difficult" then you don't understand how to do it properly. Some trivial cost accounting problems are easy but that describes a rather small subset of the cost analysis problems out there. Let me put it this way, I get paid fairly well because cost accounting isn't something just anyone can do competently.
Its not quite that simple.
Glass - really easy to recycle, we have even been doing this for decades in the UK. Only thing is, you have to sort it by colour first or it cannot be recycled, except as glass that is used in non-consumer areas.
Metal: easy to recycle, ferrous material is even easier as a big magnet can sort it. The rest is basically aluminium from drinks cans.
Paper: can be easy, but not if its contaminated with plastic (eg windowed envelopes) or plastic (coated to make it shiny). Even then, there's a limited recycling cycle for it, but it can still be burned in the end.
Plastic: now we get a problem. There are so many different types, (you can see them on your products by looking for the number inside the recycle triangle). Then there's problems with the colours - put black plastic in with the rest and it can only be turned into more black plastic. The prices for most plastic is so low that its often cheaper to just chuck it in the garbage.
Ultimately sorting at source is the only option to make recycling cost effective (and even then, if one neighbour decides to stuff his rubbish in the recycling bin, none of the lorry load that collected it gets used).
Round here, we do plastic in bags; metal, paper and glass in bins. I used to live in a place where you could put the latter 3 in a single bin as sorting that was relatively easy, but they didn't take plastic at all.
There are ways to encourage recycling like we used to do: community groups could collect things like paper, you'd store them until a church or scout group would turn up to collect bundles of one type of material (say, papers) where they would take them to be recycled and possibly even get paid for them as the bundles would be properly sorted and thus worth a lot more, or you could just put a penny deposit on glass or metal that could be refunded on return.
BTW, Ars had an interesting tour of a recycling centre:
http://arstechnica.com/science...