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."

Comments

Just now?

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Just now?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Stalin was a Georgian. Let's nuke Atlanta.

Re:Just now?

[fahrbot-bot]

Jesus tits.

Thanks for that imagery.

[ Condolences to Catholics, who will have to power through Confession ... ]

Re:Just now?

[PPH]

Yeah. And Hitler was Austrian.

G'day, mate!

Recycling in NZ used to work...

[ClarkMills]

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...

Re:Recycling in NZ used to work...

[labnet]

WA is using a few transparent bins to 'raise a conversation'
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
They should make this mandatory for recyling bins so you can see if people are contaminating it.
Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!

Re:Recycling in NZ used to work...

[tlhIngan]

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.

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.

Let's be clear...

[argStyopa]

...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.

Re:Let's be clear...

[GerryGilmore]

You're almost half-right. The Economist magazine has been following this closely. China has long been one of the main destinations for plastic and - especially - paper refuse from western countries. They recycle it into new cardboard packaging for the next round of shipped goods.
Likewise plastic waste is recycled into other plastics. They *could* do that pretty efficiently until recently as their labor costs have risen.
A positive side-effect for them is to watch us squirm under the weight of our own waste.

Re:Let's be clear...

[HornWumpus]

Most apartments outside China have trash chutes in the hall. So you don't have to carry it downstairs and it lands in a dumpster, where it can be picked up by truck.

Re:Let's be clear...

[Luckyo]

This is literally a lie packaged to sound reasonable. Most of the plastic that is being rejected is the "dirty plastic". The kind that is effectively impossible to recycle without it costing you an arm and a leg, because you need to do so much separation of crap from actually usable plastic. Which is why it's usually against the agreements to ship it for recycling.

Which was utterly ignored by clear majority of companies shipping it to China.

If you're shipping clean, recyclable plastic, they seem to be still taking it. At least last report I saw on EU exports stated that there are still exports of plastic for recycling going out to China and being received there. Just in much smaller numbers. Which indicates that those few that provide recyclable plastic as they were supposed to are still shipping to China.

Everyone else however is fucked, and that's a clear majority in EU and US. They'll still take your nice clean plastics that can just be melted into reusable plastic. They just don't want Western garbage being sold as "recyclable" in their land fills any more.

Re:Let's be clear...

[ebvwfbw]

Need to ban some dumb things, like bottled water instead of drinking tap water. The clam shell sales packaging. Some retail packaging is very wasteful.

Problem with letting policy lead the market

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:Problem with letting policy lead the market

[Mashiki]

Not quite true. Steel is cheaply recyclable and easy to sort. Aluminum is very easy to sort, and has the most profitability. Plastic on the other hand? Plastic it's cheaper to make more then recycle it. Most plastic in Canada is mixed with car tires at cement factories to make clink. Same in the US, especially since you guys like cement highways far more then we do up here.

Paper? Forget it. Should be burned or dumped into pits for methane gas retrieval, and used for power. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly to plant more trees. Then breaking it down, de-inking, re-bleaching, and reprocessing it.

Electronics? That's a hard one, especially with all the lead. Switching to tin didn't do us any favors in that one either. Simply more e-waste as electronics fail at a higher rate.

Yeah, blame China

[execthis]

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.

Re:Yeah, blame China

[Mashiki]

Recycling in Germany isn't very different then recycling in Canada. We have electronics waste funds and all the other stuff, but you can easily find with a bit of digging the number of companies in Germany shipping e-waste right to China, Vietnam, and other poor 3rd world countries for disposal. You're laboring under the delusion that there's some difference, there isn't. It was simply fools told by idiots that it was a good idea, leading idiots and fools to make everyone feel good, and people ahead of the curve to ship the waste and "make it someone else's problem." American recycling is just out in the open, other countries are simply putting a shiny bit of polish on all that garbage.

Its the same environmentalists that screech for recycling, that protest waste-to-energy plants, or waste separation facilities being built at all. Or environmental groups tying up the building of them for literal decades in court, or environmental regulations. In turn, those companies "deal" with the waste by sending it to 3rd party companies aka put on a ship and sent to the asshole of nowhere. This isn't any different then them telling you windmills and solar panels are REALLY GOOD for the environment, until you do the research yourself and find that the materials going into making it do far more damage to the environment then say, building a nuclear power plant.

Re:Yeah, blame China

[WorBlux]

The stuff that's really valuable (metals) doesn't get consumed, and honestly it takes about as much energy to make plastic as you get out of burning it. And you don't need a huge supply chain to do it, you can dispose of waste locally and cleanly. Thow in the sewer solids while you're at it.

Waste

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:All these refined materials

[jwhyche]

I'm thinking one day there will be a booming mining industry at many city dumps.

Re:All these refined materials

[onepoint]

You might be old enough to have walked into some of the old dumps as a kid, I did and what did I discover ... auto parts, houses, pipes, batteries and every assortment of things in a home.

What is currently being mined in old dumps is the methane. If they can start pumping in higher oxygen air into the lower layers ( which, btw is low in O and does not rot very quickly it's like the bottom of the ocean ) you'll effectively start the decomposing processes faster, and if you can get that to kick in, the organics will produce more usable gases. once it dries up, then mine away for the heavy metals.

I bet there is a lot of gold from old computers tossed into dumps

Re:All these refined materials

[jwhyche]

I bet there is a lot of gold from old computers tossed into dumps

Yes, I remember going through the city dump when I was kid. I was a small town so there was basically no rules on what you could or couldn't dump there. One of the thing that I remember was the amount of copper there. Copper pipes and copper wire. So yeah, there is a lot of heavy metals in these old dumps.