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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."
Every waste disposal stream has costs. The choice is what we're willing to pay to deal with it.
That, and most Americans are too fucking lazy to sort, or have any kind of care in avoiding contamination (or even learning what that means).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I RTFA the article on contamination.
It's very disengenuous.
For example it's all "oe noes toxic inks removed from paper during recycling are landfilled", so recycling is bad! Somehow this is different from dumping the very same toxic inks into a land fill while temporarily attached to paper.
The same complaint is repeated through the article.
Basically they're blaming recycling for the toxic crap that's in stuff, while ignoring the fact that landfilling toxic crap has exactly the same problems.
And lead based spray paints? Apart from for historical reconstruction work, lead paint has been illegal here since 1992.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If we don't want to save the world because it's "not profitable", then we are truly fucked. What are we, Ferengi?
How many years have these plants been running at a profit? How long have they had to improve techniques and cut costs to make this more efficient? Gas is no cheaper than it was 15 years ago (inflation adjusted) so what is the hold up? One bad year and "welp lets fold up shop!"
Sounds like a shake down of municipalities.
then we are talking about a nationwide crisis,
Crisis: the most overused word of the environmental movement. Nothing is ever a snag or a bump along the way that needs to be sorted out. No siree, everything is a world ending crisis. Not enough demand for recycled cardboard? OMG. it's a crisis.
More specifically, burn paper but not the plastic.
Paper is a renewable resource, and it doesn't make as much sense financially or environmentally to recycle it. It's also the major constituent of landfills. Fix up the supply side of the paper industry - switch from wood pulp to some other, easier to grow feedstock (switchgrass, hemp, etc...) - and close the carbon cycle by burning it. You recover the energy and reduce the volume of the remaining waste.
Plastics are harder to justify burning, IMHO. The materials needed aren't entirely renewable and they more often contain additives that don't play nice when incinerated.
=Smidge=
The energy return on incineration is dubious. Most, if not all, incinerators use additional fuel (oil or natural gast) to get the thing to burn at all, and often, if not always, the energy return is so low it ends up costing more than just burning the supplemental fuel.
This is not to say that incineration is not a useful option for waste disposal in some circumstances. But it's disingenuous to promulgate the process with promises of a net energy gain.
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.
First, stop recycling glass, it is a boondoggle. It takes more energy than just making more glass. Throw it in the ocean, we all like beach glass. Just put it someplace where it statistically will get polished smooth before it washes up on a beach, problem solved. Outlaw any kinds of glass for containers that would present an environmental hazard due to additives.
Second, let's get packaging under control, and just produce a whole lot less of it. And if we produce less plastic bottles, and go back to using more glass, then we won't need to do as much recycling, see point above. But packaging is just idiotic. What percentage of plastic clamshells are even stamped for recycling? That should be illegal. Everything plastic over a few grams should have to be marked for recycling by law if you want to sell it. For the want of a trivially-expensive feature, tons of plastic has to go to landfills that could reasonably be recycled. And since it's not food waste, it's not dirty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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Oh please. We've been doing this in Canada for 80 years and have figured out how to make profitable treefarms with a 10 year harvesting rotation. This is even more so true since we have a serious problem with pine beetles in parts of our western forests, just like in the US. The difference is here in Canada we'll cut it down and make something out of it, in the US you're too busy worrying about xyz something, and then wondering why you have massive forest fires.
Om, nomnomnom...
"fix it when it breaks"
Do you even have a smartphone? These things are designed to be unrepairable, or so expensive to repair you might as well replace them.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It all depends how you do it. Plenty of environmentalists applaud sensible refuse-burning power plants & community heating projects. If you just stick it in a field, cover it with gas, light it, and try to generate electricity from that, of course environmentalists would complain. You'd probably complain too if it was near you.
Why do you need a newer Android? Perhaps you are part of the problem.
security, the old one isn't updated anymore.
industry shoves the responsibility of having compromised devices infecting the net on to the customer, with exactly two alternatives: buy the new phone, or stop using phones altogether. clever business.
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.
Raw materials, when mined, are not refined
Realistically lots of recycled materials effectively require a "refining" step. That recycled milk jug comes frequently isn't clean so it has to be processed before the materials can be utilized.
you also have to expend more effort and energy to refine them and turn them into something useful
You have to do the same for recycled materials. The real question is whether less effort and energy (thus less cost) is required to recycle. For some products (like aluminum) the energy to turn ore into ingots is MUCH higher than to recycle. For others (like plastic) the economic advantage of recycling isn't so clear because it's relatively cheap to make the virgin product.
With recycling, you bypass a lot of that, so it should be cheaper and more efficient: instead of going through all these refining steps, you just take some used HDPE, grind it up and/or melt it down, and make more HDPE containers out of it.
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Recycled materials require that they to be sorted, contaminants have to be removed, it has to be cleaned, it has to be processed into a useable form for processing. These costs are not trivial and the waste stream is definitely not clean and well organized. Furthermore for many materials like plastics or paper the contaminants cannot always be removed or the chemical structure is altered such that they cannot be a perfect substitute for virgin materials.
So if the economics are favoring using virgin raw materials instead of recycling existing refined materials, we're doing something really wrong.
Or it means that it is a more difficult problem than you are presuming. It sounds like it should be easier but unless the energy inputs for the raw materials are very high (like for aluminum) for processing raw materials relative to recycled there is no particular reason to presume that recycling should be more energy or labor efficient than processing from raw materials. It sounds good on paper but that doesn't mean the economics work out nicely in the real world.