Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.