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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."
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'
and we are running out of landfill space.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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.
What people have found was the old sorted recycling bins didn't work - people did participate, but only to a minor degree. Something like it was only really capturing 20% of available recyclable materials - the stuff people really knew they could recycle. The rules of what went in which bin or bag was just complex enough that unless you knew, it would go into the trash because it was just too complex.
In fact, for a time, the plastic recycling was limited to a few numbers - and you had to know what the item plastic number was and what was supported. This turned out to be horrendously complex, that they now just say the item type - e.g., plastic water bottles, yogurt cups, etc. Enough so that other than a few items (e.g., plastic bags), almost anything plastic can go in.
Revolutions in machine vision and learning made it possible to do "single stream" recycling, where you just put it all in a single bin and let the machines figure it out. It turns out participation and recovery rates dramatically rise when this happens, so even though the quality is lower, the amount recovered is greater.
And really things like paper degrade very quickly, so even degraded, it can be composted - recycling of paper is far less important than capturing plastics which last far longer in the environment (years and decades) and cause all sorts of issues (pollution - when they break up into microplastics and get swallowed by animals, and the great plastic patches of the world simply accelerate this process.) So it's better to capture plastic.
Glass? That's almost too easy to recycle, But also glass is non-economical to recycle... used glass just doesn't sell for much.