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There is No Guarantee That the Products You Recycle Are Actually Recycled, the UK Watchdog Warns (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The National Audit Office (NAO) says over half of the packaging reported as recycled is actually being sent abroad to be processed. As a result, it says, the government has little idea of whether the recyclables are getting turned into new products, buried in landfill or burned. While an illusion of success has been created by the UK's system for recycling packaging, the NAO says, the reality may be quite different. Its report finds that: The government has turned a blind eye to underlying problems with the waste system. Firms may be over-stating the amount they are recycling. The Environment Agency has only carried out 40% of the recycling checks it planned to.
As a result, it says, the government has little idea of whether the recyclables are getting turned into new products, buried in landfill or burned.
If you don't know then the answer is that they are being handled in whatever manner is least expensive and/or most profitable. Most likely that is either burning or landfill with the chances increasing the lower the energy inputs required to make new. To presume otherwise is to be naive. Steel and aluminum are probably recycled because the energy required to make new is enormous versus recycling. Plastics are probably just buried or burned or dumped in the ocean.
There is a saying that people don't do what you EXPECT, they do what you INSPECT. If you want to be sure it is being handled appropriately then you need to inspect the process to be sure. If you don't inspect then you won't get what you expect.
Are you saying that's an argument for recycling theater?
Nobody is ignoring the cost of landfill, it is just the cheapest, by far. Making people sort and wash their trash into 32 streams that all end in the landfill is just the _stupidest_ of all outcomes. Unless you're just trying to train people to do as they are told.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's why i don't recycle because there safer in the landfill. At least its contained and cheaper for myself.
That doesn't make any sense. So, some fraction of the plastic sent to recycling doesn't actually get recycled... but it doesn't make sense to say it's "safer" to send it directly to landfill, instead of recycling some of it and then sending what's left to landfill.
Actually, in many cases it is safer, cheaper and better to just throw things in a landfill. In theory, recycling is a really great idea. But in actual practice, it often causes more pollution and environmental damage, not less.
For example, the process that is used to recycle paper involves various chemicals and as a by-product, generates many tens of thousands of tons of toxic sludge that has to be disposed of -- by dumping it into a landfill. It would be far less harmful to just throw the paper away and dump it into a landfill.
It's the same for recycling many other things as well. In many cases, the recycling process generates air, water or ground pollution that wouldn't be generated if you just throw stuff away and don't try to "recycle" it.
Recycling is also extremely expensive and just simply not economically viable. That's why the U.S. and EU export all their trash to various third world countries. The only way that recycling can even come close to be economically viable is to do it in a situation where people are paid pennies a day and where there are little or no environmental regulations.
Glass recycling is more about preventing broken glass bottles from littering the streets and parks. The deposit on most bottles (paid when you buy the beverage, refunded when you return the bottle at a recycler) encourages people to dispose of the bottles properly, instead of just chuck them out the car window. And even if you do chuck them out the window, some homeless person will probably clean them up for the deposit. Glass is just sand that's been melted, and is one of the more innocuous things you can put into a landfill (doesn't degrade into other nasty chemicals). So it winding up in landfills instead of being recycled isn't really a problem.
Likewise, paper buried in landfills is sequestered carbon. The tree pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere, used energy from sunlight to break off the O2, and locked up the Carbon in the form of cellulose. We chopped the tree down and turned that cellulose into paper. Burying the paper represents putting the carbon back underground, the reverse of what we do when we dig up and burn fossil fuels. In theory the paper could eventually biodegrade (converting the C back into CO2). But core samples drilled into landfills have come up with bits of newspaper over a century old, indicating not much biodegrading goes on. So burying paper in a landfill instead of recycling it isn't a problem either. (You don't really save trees by recycling paper - it's in the logger's best interest to re-plant any tree they chop down, so they'll have another tree to chop down in 20-40 years. So in developed countries, the number of trees remains fairly constant.)
Metals usually cost enough to refine that it's worth recycling them.
It's the plastics that are the problem. When I asked my garbage hauling service how they sort plastics, they claimed they hired inmates at below-minimum wage to do it for them.
When fines are issued, it is no longer mere "emphasizing", but forcing.
Nor are we talking of "good behavior", but rather of obedience. Manually separating trash, which will be mixed back together, is not "good behavior" — it is a patently stupid one. Only an authoritarian — like yourself — would insist on forcing a known stupidity for the sake of obedience...
I suggest, the government stops pretending to be a parent, who knows better, and stops punishing people for failing to separate, what will be mixed back together anyway.
Oh, wow, a genuine concern for tax dollars. Very simple: when (if!) you fix the problem, then you can start issuing fines again.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.