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Some Recycling Is Now Being Re-Routed To Landfills (wral.com)
"Thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of U.S. cities and towns -- including several in Oregon -- have gone to landfills," reports the New York Times. Slashdot reader schwit1 summarizes their report:
One big reason: China has essentially shut the door to U.S. recyclables. The Times notes that about a third of recyclables gets shipped abroad, with China the biggest importer. But starting this year, China imposed strict rules on what it will accept, effectively banning most of it. That, the Times reports, has forced many recycling companies who can't find other takers to dump recyclables into landfills.
"Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives," reports the Times, though most major U.S. cities aren't affected, and countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are now importing more materials.
But at least some recycling companies are simply stockpiling material, "while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy."
"Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives," reports the Times, though most major U.S. cities aren't affected, and countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are now importing more materials.
But at least some recycling companies are simply stockpiling material, "while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy."
in one place. But no, let's mine asteroids first!
LOL.
Jesus tits. They've been sending lots of recycling to landfills, forever.
Paper and colored glass recycling is just a show. Getting you to sort your trash is just conditioning you to do what your told.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
C'mon, Trump! Didn't you promise jobs? Here's your opportunity.
We should take this new opportunity to reconsider foreign entanglements - there's no real reason every country can't be responsible for recycling their own waste. There's no good reason we should expect the 3rd world to handle our garbage.
When recycling started big time here in NZ we had open recycling crates that were great, everyone could see what was in the bin, not so good for privacy [you drink too much wine]. Later they changed them to larger lidded wheelie bins and then the recycling content was degraded significantly as no-one could see the crap that was being put in there. No doubt China didn't appreciate the hugely lowered quality of recycling material that they were getting.
I suspect we're not the only country that is guilty of this...
filling up our cities with our own waste! They act with impunity! Something has to be done about the chinese! // The average American
...China wasn't taking it because it's some sort of a utopia of recycling.
This story makes it sound like because of Trump, recycling isn't happening any more. Recycling (of these items that are no longer going to China) WAS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENING. It was being taken out of the sight of effete righteous dilettante Westerners who didn't want to *actually* deal with the hard choices of their 'recycling life style'...and essentially being dumped around the corner in the poor people's neighborhood.
The US is *awash* in recycled paper and plastics. Nobody wants them. Nobody can use them. Even National Geographic, the MOST self-righteously environmental organization, prints its magazine on virgin clay-coated paper, justifying its choice to refuse recycled base by its mission to deliver stunning photography being more important than the small amount of recycled paper it might consume. (Until very recently it wasn't really even recyclable after.
That's rationalized HOGWASH.
-Styopa
I realize some people will label this as uber-technological overoptimism, but I've always thought that the trash problem will ultimately be solved once and for all by a self-reproducing nanobot ecology that hunts down abandoned materials such as iron, copper, glass, and so forth for ultra-clean recycling. The notoriously appalling Great Pacific garbage patch -- gone. Active and closed landfills around the world -- emptied out, thoroughly sanitized, and turned into recreation parks. Centuries of trash dumped overboard onto the ocean floor by uncaring sailors and passengers -- poof. Sure, it'll probably take centuries to hunt down every last glass shard from broken bottles, every last rusty nail hiding a few feet under the soil in former construction sites, every last potsherd buried in the muck of the Marianas Trench alongside ancient sunken ships, and so on and on, but the trillions of future nanobots are relentless and powered by unending energy from fusion reactors and sunlight from orbital collectors.
In the meantime, I'm supportive of initiatives to burn combustible trash for energy and to seek even more efficient ways to extract as much reusable metal as possible from current trash streams. If they make economic sense, why not? Those trillions of nanobots might not arrive for decades yet, and every gram of metal saved today is a gram that needn't be freshly mined from gigantic holes in the ground.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
If you think China was recycling anything you're insane. What typically happens is a company will take the product and either dump it, burn it or in the case of electronics possibly "recertify" and resell the damn things back into the market. Believe it or not there are companies who do nothing more then grind plastic into pelets and ship that all the way back to NA.
We have clean burning incinerators too (in Edmonton Alberta for example), but people have a serious case of not in my backyard syndrom when it comes to their garbage. They thhink recycling is a magic mushroom in the sky that takes their garbage.
I'm not a tree hugging lefty but even I can see the wasted resources we exert in the production of electronics just to scrap them because companies don't want to support perfectly working hardware. Nor will Governments get off their asses and REQUIRE right to repair legislation -- Hey G7.. whose going to give a shit about gender equality when you've fucked the planet?
We have been separating our trash for many years now here. It all goes to the same landfill. Some in blue bags, some in green bags, it all goes in the same hole.
It's just paying to pass the problem on to someone else.
Old news. My parents stopped recycling 10 YEARS ago when they saw the recycling truck emptying at the same landfill as the garbage.
and we are running out of landfill space.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Follow your leader, immolate yourself.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The market doesn’t follow if it’s not profitable to do so, and recycling will never be profitable..
or even be revenue neutral.
Large segments of our western society believe recycling is important. An even larger segment - which broadly overlaps with the first, somehow - doesn’t want to actually pay for anything.
#DeleteChrome
Almost every locale has a story about someone following the local recycle truck to the same dump the garbage goes to. Global warming is real, but recycling for the most part is not.
It's time for the US to start investing in high efficiency incinerators like much of Europe already does.
And of course the Republicans are part of the fucking problem.
It is really sad that we think of ourselves as the most advanced country in the world and yet almost nothing we do is truly sustainable. We take pride in protecting our children and yet consume resources at an alarming rate.
We should be working toward creating systems and infrastructure that is 100% sustainable even if adopted by all of the world's population. That is simply responsible engineering.
It is only cheaper to just landfill the materials because we aren't considering the costs our children will incur in trying to separate out the materials after decades of degradation because natural deposits in easy to remove concentrations are running out.
We should at least estimate that cost and force companies that don't accomplish (not just provide for) 100% recycling to charge for the future costs of material leakage from the pipeline and bank the money in public funds for our children.
China rejects the extremely low-grade American "recyclables" that are very poorly separated from other forms of waste.
Blame China for large amounts being subsequently sent to landfills.
Bullshit.
I have personally witnessed materials placed in recycling bins at a company I worked at in the Bay Area being collected by a non-recycling, waste truck.
Visit any business' waste dumpster in the Bay Area and you will see more recyclable materials than other types of waste.
Recycling is mostly a lie. It's a way for politicians to score green points.
The US isn't running out of room in it's landfills. You can put a modern landfill just about anywhere. The limiting factor is nobody wants a landfill in their county.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
The other factor is we are throwing away less and less garbage per person, as packaging becomes more efficient. 30 years ago nearly everything you bought in a store came in it's own box, even if it was already in a tube or dispenser. Wal-mart forced companies to do away with the extra box to save money.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
everyone should go visit their local recycling facility to see what is going on (my local facility offers guided tours)... you might not see the whole truth, but that's a start. I only recycle aluminum and plastic, everything else goes in the trash... especially pape/cardboard.
Do you honestly think that recyclables that aren't separated from the beginning actually end up in a recycling facility?
Over 90% of recyclables end up in landfills. While a lot of people are doing their part by separating trash from recyclables, the trash companies are just dumping everything into the same landfills.
I don't know if it includes recyclables, but NY sends a trainload of something to someplace south of DC. It really stinks up the air when I'm waiting for the commuter train.
the vast majority of people with more than two kids are not white.
what are you going to do about it, cuck?
What is really needed is for nations to start recycling their own goods and to do a lot less manufacturing offshore and instead, move it on-shore.
Why? Because the pollution from just 16 of China's ships is more than what the world does with vehicles. Now that is pollution,not CO2. Still, we need to stop this insanity.
Hopefully, the west will get smart about this. Just go into old mines and put the various sorted elements for future recycling. And as to the un-wanted elements, such as mercury, lead, etc, those will likely be wanted somewhere down the road. So again, stash them in old mines.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
One of the great disasters in preserving the environment is the widespread belief that recycling is somehow close to reducing consumption and reusing.
It depends on the case, but recycling is usually closer to outright waste than not consuming something, but most people seem to see recycling as nearly benign environmentally. Marketers know that slapping the word "recycle" on a product makes people think they're green, borderline tree-huggers. Now our world is drowning in garbage people think they are innocent of.
The Story of Stuff starts putting things in perspective.
China needs to send their ships back home with full loads. Up until their stopping recycling garbage, that 'garbage' accounted for something like 10-20% of all items going back to CHina. Now, they will have to put other resources/goods in those ships.
What I find interesting is that CHina did this to punish Trump for his tariffs. BUT, I think that this actually helped the world. Yeah, at the moment, nations are scrambling, but this will force nations to have a surplus of elements that they can build with.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Complete idiocy, it's cheaper to send them home empty if you can't find paying cargo.
They did this before Trumps protectionist tariffs anyway, so can't be a response to them.
Only thing is the mayor didn't tell anyone and they keep charging for recycling. Oh, and he's paying something like $50/ton to dump it in a landfill in the next state vs $10/ton to send it to a local recycling facility. Scandal!
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Any scent of food, and your garbage is torn apart and scattered the entire block. People just need more bears in their lives :)
[($)]
Placing paper and plastic in a bin is only one way to do it, and as the article shows, it's not very effective a lot of the time. If you care about the environment, there are more effective ways: buy used electronics like phones, instead of new. Buy recycled stuff, reusable bags. Don't put the vegetables at the grocery store in a little plastic bag. Then go out and enjoy the outdoors, which is the very thing that is being threatened by our unsustainable consumption.
Don't give up just because our efforts don't always work.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
A simpler solution is to reuse packaging rather than try to recycle it.
This could be done fairly easily in the food retail industry as the supermarket chains are big players in that one and have a lot of influence over the supply chain. The chains get together to decide on a common design for all packaging, determined mostly be weight and other factors like being able to view the foodstuff i.e. vegetables. Once the packaging is standardised, they pass it to the supply chain. Granted, there will be an initial cost with replacement of relevant machinery as well as processes to ensure returned packaging is clean and fit to be reused again. Consumers can be incentivised by bringing back used packaging to the local supermarket in exchange for points which goes towards future shopping. The packaging is then sent back to the food producers who then reuse.
Huge quantities of "recycling" material in the US have been going straight into the same dumps and landfills as the other trash for DECADES. There were stories about this in the 1990s. When asked, politicians have long quietly admitted that recycling programs are mostly about a combination of feel-goodism, PR, and training the public. Depending on the economics of the markets at any given moment, glass and aluminum are most-frequently actually recycled. Paper is much less often actually recycled. Plastic contalners, not so much.
If a REAL global war or economic depression were to break out, then the capability and capacity could come in mighty handy, but in ordinary circumstances the economics often just don't work out.
As if that lying sack of shit is actually going to do anything that doesn't directly benefit him.
Seems to me, that if you and the parent poster really gave two fucks instead of Trump bashing. You'd be petitioning for waste to energy facilities. After all, Trump *reduced* regulations and adjusted the environmental regulations on things like that, so go on. It doesn't benefit him, but he's already created the environment to make it happen.
Oh what? You don't want to do it. Gee it's almost like you're the same delusional idiots that believed recycling wasn't really shipping waste to another country or to a landfill in the first place.
Om, nomnomnom...
More Windy made up numbers, show your work.
... all major cities in Germany simply throw all their trash back onto one pile, and burn it in the same plant.
Because it is legal and it is cheaper for them. (Apparent cost. Of course the real damages from wasting valuables is huge. But if you are a moron and an asshole, long-term thinking and social thnking are not known concepts.)
This is the oldest process and biggest non-secret of the entire recycling industry.
What do you do with product sent for recycling that you can't recycle? (Three guesses, first two don't count).
Does the reason why you can't recycle it change what you do with it? (Three guesses, first two don't count).
Too much product returned for recycling is just as common as non-recyclable material contaminating the recycle stream. Like, this had to be figured out on day one, a bazillion years ago (they've been recycling aluminum for almost as long as they've been smelting aluminum).
Hey, it's not all bad news. In Canada, we import garbage paper from the US, because we can't get enough from domestic use to incorporate recycled content at the desired % (not because Canadians don't recycle paper, because we don't use as much as would be required; we'd import it even if recycling was 100% compliance).
And then there are cost considerations. Sometimes the recycled product costs more to recycle than you can get for it as post-consumer waste. So you either sell it at a loss or send it to the landfill. This is rocket science?
Lol. In Germany, nearly all bottles are deposit bottles. Be it glass, multi-use plastic or single-use plastic.
And the glass ones are the cheapest, most popular, and rising in popularity, due to the bad taste and BpA or other shit from the plastic dissolving into your drinks.
Everyone selling that stuff must take it back too.
Maybe we're just not too retarded to think around more than one corner and realize what's coming back to bite us in the ass in the long term.
All of his nuggety numbers are brown. and they aren't chocolate.
I always found it stupid how "recycling" these days seems to involve smashing glass bottles, melting them down and then producing new glass bottles... Seems an extremely energy intensive process compared to just washing the bottles and refilling them.
Deposit bottles should be cheaper than melting down or disposable bottles, it just needs infrastructure in place which again shouldnt be hard - a truck delivers the full bottles to a store, the customers return to the store to buy more products and in doing so take their empties, the truck returns to where it came from containing empty bottles instead of being totally empty.
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Lowest black unemployment rate since records were kept....DONE.
Clearly, we need to sweep all the trash under low-lying coastal areas so that as climate change melts the ice caps, those areas will not be inundated.
Cuba is pretty resource poor with little access to metals and plastics. We should start trading with them for recyclables. They could really use the materials.
Recycling is really someone else buying your garbage. It make some people "feel good" with the concept that someone might be pulling something useful out of used toilet paper- but those same people likely buy the cheapest product which isn't anything recycled. Let's admit that "recycling" is bullsh!t and move on.
The OP does have a point, as I see this attitude with them a lot. Which raises the question of are they being "green" because it's the right thing to do, or are they just doing it to be 'cool'?
A lot of places will clean and reuse glass bottles. This isn't anything new. But there is a limit to how many times that can be accomplished due to health concerns from your local health department.
Well, if you have pre sorted recycling, dump all the metals in one place for future mining projects.
Easier to refine than raw ore.
Also pass laws banning single use plastic - everything is to be made from paper.
no more forks, spoons, knives, bags, etc - eliminate the waste stream.
Paper that can be mulched / shredded and at least cleanly burned for waste generated power plants.
I'd bet that at least in the USA the biggest reason this doesn't happen is the convenience factor. On the business side plastic bottles are probably cheaper to buy than just the cost of cleaning old bottles, not to mention the cost of transport.
Tariff the various categories of plastics that China exports to the US, especially since they no longer recycle the junk they export. Price of packaging and plastic parts goes way up, consumption goes down, recycling goes up since it cost more, it's a backdoor way of taxing chinese intellectual property theft, and will help to rebalance the trade deficit.