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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.
Because to economically recycle plastic, it has to be source sorted by recycling # (which reflects chemistry).
Which means you need to have a half dozen plastic recycle bins, imputes a value of $0.01/hour to your time.
Also colored glass and paper is almost never actually recycled.
The bastards do this, because the sorting time looks free to them. They should be kicked square in the balls/cunt.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
This is a known problem in the States too. NYC, in particular, sends over half of its "recyclables" to landfill anyway. But, not to worry, they still fine people for failing to sort their trash — whether it helps environment or not, whatever increases the government's power over the subjects is a good thing, is not it?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
>> The Environment Agency has only carried out 40% of the recycling checks it planned to.
99% of these stories about an agency's work end with "and if they only had more money, they could finally do the job they were supposed to do". They almost always leave out the budget distractions, ridiculous IT contracts, HR training, excessive pay, unfire-able lifers, extraneous administrators and other items that could be slashed instead.
Seattle sends its unsorted recycling to China.
Maybe it's time for a real ecological study on the real effects of recycling vs. simply burying everything. Our oceans deserve more than a good feeling we get by putting things in the blue bins.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
All the trash goes in wherever in whatever bin. I have given up trying to be the good tenant because my landlord doesn't seem to give a shit. In my previous apartment I was blamed for other tenants putting the wrong stuff in the wrong bins. I wish people would make up their minds. these days I really don't give a shit about the whole recycling thing because no one else around me seems to care. I hope the coming generations enjoy living on top of smoldering landfills with plastic choked oceans encircling them. Bah.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Perhaps but if you are paying someone to recycle it and they burn it instead then then you aren't getting what you paid for. If I hire your company to recycle my plastic then there are clear expectations about what that means and what it should cost. If I pay you to recycle it and you burn it because that's cheaper then that is fraud, plain and simple. Whether or not that is the optimal use for the material is irrelevant to the contractual agreement. And of course there are the environmental considerations too but those are a separate matter.
Unless you can find someone to work for $0.05/hour you can't afford to 'recycle' it, though burning it is technically recycling it.
??? Burning it is most definitely NOT recycling. You know darn well what recycling means.
The cheapest thing is almost certainly also the greenest.
If that statement were true then dumping toxic waste in nearby ponds would be the greenest thing possible. It's true that green CAN be cheap but there is a reason the Tragedy of the Commons is a problem.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Landfill would be a better bet. Most packaging in recycling bins is either made from fossil-carbon sources like oil or natural gas or from trees and plants like paper and cardboard. Burying it sequesters that carbon and doesn't immediately add to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere whereas burning it does.
Burning it and generating energy from the process would offsets an equal mass of fossil fuel, so it wouldn't add CO2 to the atmosphere. That actually makes the most sense-- you get the value out of the oil in the form of plastic, and then get the energy out of the oil when you're done with using the plastic.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's the thought that counts...
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.
If that were true, it would be a butt simple decision. You get a good fraction of the energy back, not 100%.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So normal paper is then made from Majic and doesnâ(TM)t produce harmful by products??
You obviously have no understanding how paper is made. While using recycled paper is not 100% pollution free, neither is creating new paper. You reduce environmental impact by recycling. But with recycling you need also efficiency, as with everything.
Creating new paper doesn't require the removal of toxic ink, which is then buried in the form of sludge.
No, it costs about $1 in gas and $15 in time to stop at the car parts store on the way home to dump it responsibly. It costs $2000 in fine plus $600 in lost work if I get caught dumping it down the drain.
You forgot to risk adjust your calculations to come up with an expected cost. You multiply the cost by the chances of getting caught which in all likelihood are extremely low.
Make the people on welfare do it. Are you able to work and getting government money? Well looks like you're going be sorting recyclables.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Clean it, then bury it. That seems to be the best for the environment.
[($)]
That depends on whether you're in an area that actually depends on fossil fuels for electrical power. British Columbia, Quebec, and significant chunks of Ontario do not. They're either on Hydro Electric power or on Nuclear (in the case of Ontario and Quebec).
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Recycling is how it gets into our Oceans.
[($)]
I was working late one night and discovered that the cleaning crew was routinely emptying the blue trashcans with the recycle logos on the side into the same bin as the non-recyclable waste. This was back in the later-'90s and I can easily imagine this happening all over. Even today. [sigh]
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I've always been in support of recycling even when I knew as a student all the dumpsters went into the SAME garbage truck (I saw it after school.)
Multiple parts in the process have to ALL be addressed. If you get everybody but jerks recycling that is just the 3rd part of the process. 1st part is regulating what's made, we don't hardly do that.... 2nd part is not buying stupid cheap disposable shit we do not need in the 1st place (that won't ever happen.) + more steps...
China had all those boats full of junk we bought and since they took over, we had nothing to ship back to them so they made $$$ taking our UNSORTED trash without any accountability when they got it back home. Now they don't want our trash, it's not more profitable than just buying the gas for the boat.
If we want recycling to work, we have to not be so LAZY and presort again. Then we have to BAN mixed materials because nobody seriously sorts by looking at those 1-7 labels on the plastic... That isn't even the big thing-- banning stupid things like straws is finally being done. Things like BOTTLES should have remained glass (clean and reuse) like they always were-- it's entirely corporate conspiracy to slander consumers for not recycling their forced TRASH because they want to save pennies on containers (because their competition is cheaper... hence the NEED to regulate a level playing field. just like regulations stop your business from assassinating your competition.)
Government WORKS only if YOU collectively inspect/regulate it same with corporations and the assholes that make up 1/3 of society. We get what we deserve.
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In the States in some areas we have Single Stream Recycling.
Where you put in all your recyclable (Paper, Some plastics normally the thick plastic, and Metal) materials into one bin. Then it goes and gets sorted out.
Only about 1/3 of the material actually gets recycled. However the amount of material sent over to be recycled has increased 5 fold. So overall we are better with a less efficient process, because the convenience makes it easier to increase your output.
For some reason there is a reaction if something isn't working as well as it should, we should just stop it all together. While the net benefit outweighs the cost.
I have also heard a similar type of argument against LED traffic lights. Because in a rare weather condition snow can cover the lights, and be hard to see, while incandescent bulbs create enough heat to melt the snow.
Because of this perhaps once a year occurance, people are using this to prevent LED lights, which use less energy, are cheaper to maintain, offer better viability, as well often will not die at once.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Burning fossil-carbon-derived plastic adds CO2 to the atmosphere. Burying it in landfills unburnt means it doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere. Saying that it's likely that the plastic will decompose slowly underground but it will take decades or centuries to form methane and eventually CO2 and escape into the atmosphere which is a good thing in the medium term. We're still heading for 450ppm CO2 and beyond in a couple of decades time.
We have trillions of tonnes of fossil carbon we can dig up and burn in the form of coal and lignite which can't easily be turned into plastic, assuming we want to continue committing slow suicide by fossil carbon combustion. Burning fossil-carbon plastic as well just speeds things up.
The 3 R’s. There is a reason recycle is third in reuse, repurpose, recycle. Just disposing of so much is stupid, when much if it can be used still, abet for other things than originally intended.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Recycling is more the last option, reducing and reusing as much as possible instead of recycling it much better.
Aluminum, lead-acid batteries, steel and a few others
For most disposable products, recycling is a political tactic to make environmentally conscientious people believe that disposable products are environmentally friendly
First, take all the packaging - and leave it at the store. Make them deal with it and bear the cost. Then it shows up as bad corporate behavior on the annual reports.
Second, reduce usage. If a tiny battery comes in ten pounds of packaging, don't buy that. Or leave it on the sales desk.
Third, reuse. I just brought in ten ramen in a bread bag. I'll probably use that bread bag three to five times. This cuts my waste to 1/3 throught 1/5 what most people do, plus I didn't need a bag. This also can be used as a garbage bag, by the way. The reason I brought in ten ramen was I bought a cardboard case of 24, and you can reuse that box or recycle it.
Fourth, recycle. But if you have a need for soup, reuse your cottage cheese container to store it or other sauces.
There, cut the waste stream by 90 percent. Stop whining, grandpa!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
All CD/DVDs are poly-carbonate - it's industry. But the law could say you have to PICK a standard and stay with it. So say all food containers must be PP #5? no mixed caps made from #2 or #4. All PVS must be white and all ABS must be black... kind of already happens in plumbing pipe. exceptions for classes of products... Think of it like HID class drivers. Sure some will bitch that they can't make their product different by confusing the situation-- well, tough, you can't make your bike out of radioactive materials so it glows either.
Tax the exceptions to cover the burden those things impose; that creates incentives to innovate around the taxes.... nothing seems to motivate capitalists more than avoiding taxes... we should capitalize upon that!
Obviously, globalization is a huge huge problem and tariffs need to be done... stronger than in the past and the WTO and our treaties do all seem to totally suck... Trump is right on that; but we need intelligent new ones and he appears unable to beat the bad ones we have already.
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I have not heard anything about the LED stop lights having trouble with snow cover. We have some new stop lights that appear to be LED they have hoods over the light to keep snow from gathering on the light. Snow could still collect under the hood on the light if it was windy enough but dust would be a larger issue in my area and incandescent bulbs wouldn't really help with that.
I don't find it surprising that people would be against change of any kind there are groups in my area that are against solar and wind power because of birds and solar panels are ugly. You can't have a windmill that powers a coy pond but my neighbor can have a decorative windmill the same size.
Burning it and generating energy from the process would offsets an equal mass of fossil fuel, so it wouldn't add CO2 to the atmosphere.
You have the logic of this wrong though I understand what you are trying to say. This isn't offsetting fossil fuel consumption. It is just using a delayed form of burning from oil previously pumped. We are adding roughly the same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere if we burn X amount of oil or if we burn previously pumped oil that has been turned into plastic. Either way the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases by roughly the same amount. As long as the plastic remains plastic it's effectively prevented from turning into CO2 roughly akin to if it had been left in the ground. (there are other problems but that's a separate issue)
That actually makes the most sense-- you get the value out of the oil in the form of plastic, and then get the energy out of the oil when you're done with using the plastic.
At the cost of pumping a bunch of carbon and other stuff into the atmosphere. Plus you have to expend additional energy to turn the oil into plastic though this is something of a sunk cost if you were going to do that anyway. If you can recycle the plastic directly into another plastic then you are sort of practicing a form of carbon sequestration, albeit something of a messy and energy intensive one. Burning plastic is not as efficient as burning "pure" oil and derived fuels.
Stupid naive leftists.
Recycling means reuse. Not perpetual reuse.
Burning is not reuse so your point remains invalid.
When LEDs were first used for stop lights, they were being covered by ice and snow in northern areas during winter under some conditions. Since that time, manufacturers have modified designs so that there are heaters that activate automatically. This guy talks about how the overall benefits of LED traffic lights far outweigh the disadvantages of them in their early deployment.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You can't efficiently solve a multiple step problem involving multiple parties (not all who are willing to participate) all at the same exact time... trying to do that makes it nearly impossible to do.
You give the kids a habit of recycling even though the school trashes everything. Later, as adults, they are used to the whole process so they are not lazy bitching litter bugs resisting change/progress and having to lift a finger. I could figure that out as a teen? how old are you?
Furthermore, upset adults who spent their lives as part of the theater SHOULD want to make it REAL rather than give up something that was supposed to work and would work if somebody in government wasn't corrupt.
I vote. I know they are crooks, I aim for lesser crooks - I do not stop and do nothing; and I sure as hell go for somebody trying to fix the system in a significant way.... a lot of gullible people did that in 2016 (not all of them, some are racists or xenophobes or tribal or crooks.)
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There is, however, a guarantee that products not recycled aren't
China, who was taking most of our recyclables, has stopped. Newsprint, which was going for $100 per ton, now sells for $5 a ton on the market. Recycling has failed in the US. Your recycling is going to the landfills right now.
However, there are people developing new plastic recycling techniques using chemicals instead of the standard mechanical methods. No word on if this chemical method will have an environmental impact or if it will be economically feasible. It is being developed to recycle the plastic that is floating in the ocean. There is a project underway to gather the plastic and recycle it using the new chemical method. The chemical method still requires sorting.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Unless the ink removal process converts the ink into a toxic chemical. Anyone have insight on that?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
And you can heat the lens if you are really hopped up about this "problem."
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If there's no economic advantage to recycling over dumping, maybe recycling isn't worth it. Ideally you'd be able to tell that recycling is actually happening because it'd be cheaper than dumping. Of course I'm ignoring the environmental impact. If that's the only benefit of recycling, I fear we're doing something wrong.
That was an issue solved a while ago. The light systems for places where it snows have been redesigned to add a heat element for melting the snow. Other places that have not purchased the newer system just send crews out to clean them off.
The ones here probably have heaters to melt the snow and ice but I know that we have crews out to clean them once a year because of dust anyway. They replaced some that didn't appear to seal well the light covers where always foggy looking and it was hard to see which light was illuminated in the middle of the day and some in new areas that all appear to be LED. The new traffic lights are much brighter day and night and appear to be made up of many LEDs.
Everything can be called indoctrination; did you grow up on a deserted island all by yourself? If not, then you were indoctrinated. It's all a matter of WHAT is to be indoctrinated not whether or not it is going to happen. My tribe good... better tribe than you tribe...
Does everybody question and think about everything on their own? Hell no! I wish. Most the planet is religious; oh yes, religion is fundamentally indoctrination. Is it bad? sometimes. Is it good? Well, i don't want to argue with everybody I meet to convince them it's a bad idea to kill me and take my stuff... Surely, you'd want some indoctrination and LAWS that align with that. Some laws go too far some not far enough; where you get upset is when it doesn't align with your values. Oh, BTW, where did you get your values? (hint: topic is indoctrination.)
Stupid people need simple directions to follow with simple reasons. God said so ;-)
Seriously, even us smarter educated people have plenty of stupid moments; to be stupid sometimes IS to be human...arguably it IS the normal human state; after all, cognitive psychology keeps proving that point further.
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China, who was taking most of our recyclables, has stopped. Newsprint, which was going for $100 per ton, now sells for $5 a ton on the market. Recycling has failed in the US. Your recycling is going to the landfills right now.
However, there are people developing new plastic recycling techniques using chemicals instead of the standard mechanical methods. No word on if this chemical method will have an environmental impact or if it will be economically feasible. It is being developed to recycle the plastic that is floating in the ocean. There is a project underway to gather the plastic and recycle it using the new chemical method. The chemical method still requires sorting.
For $5/ton, burning newsprint for power starts to make a lot of sense, assuming the power plant is near to where the material is being collected. That's only around $9/MWh ($0.009) for fuel. You would definitely want a sliding grate boiler and a serious electrostatic precipitator though. Assuming the trucking costs were reasonable, this is very much economical.
Burning tree material is mostly carbon-neutral, but I'm sure that environmentalists would be tripping all over themselves arguing whether burying (sequestering) it would be better or worse than burning it.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
And in any case, recycling is a good habit to develop.
The single stream recycling is a main culprit in the collapse of the Chinese recycling market. Materials were getting contaminated and were worthless. We were getting less value by trying to do more.
Pushing recycling so hard resulted in garbage in recycle bins. We created a culture of "if in doubt, recycle it" rather than an informed culture of only recycling things that should be. From leftist shaming of people for not recycling to municipalities putting cameras in garbage trucks to make sure you didn't throw away recyclables, to giving people smaller garbage cans and reducing pick up schedules, we've social engineered a disaster. All well meaning, but completely oblivious to reality. Why do recycle trucks have dirty diapers in them? Because people don't want a garbage can full of them for 2-4 weeks when the recycle truck comes weekly.
And you can heat the lens if you are really hopped up about this "problem."
No that's just it. The problems are easily solvable, but really that doesn't change those people arguging against it. It's not just LED traffic lights either. There are countless cases where a change produces a huge net benefit while the detractors will find one very specific very rare example where something won't work and then use that as a case against the entire project.
We see that constantly right here on Slashdot too.
I'm skeptical of your cynicism! believe in god still? heaven? democracy? heil trumpf? scientists? have all the time in the world and brains to do everything yourself? think you picked yourself up by your own bootstraps? think others can? think others are equal to you therefore shouldn't get anything you didn't get?
Propaganda is about emotions. Thinking only in support of those emotions. Sometimes it can be hard to see the nuance between thinking bringing out emotions and emotions driving rationalization.
I've not checked out Democracy Now in years. They were the best thing in the USA for a decade; don't know about now. Infowars, I followed in the early days before it existed because I have a conspiracy friend who was a huge fan but it was to me largely entertainment as it evolved into a big greedy ego fest that it is now... it's clearly for profit, unlike democracy now.
Cynicism itself can be a paranoid delusion itself... A real cynic has to be capable of being cynical about cynicism itself sometimes... don't just bite on every conspiracy story. You may not be, but there are people who actually are selfless people and a shitload of people lying to themselves and others. Plenty of selfish takers too; if not the majority... which is why capitalism kind of works (but not in it's extremes one has to be cynical about all religions, especially economic ones because economics are the real gods.)
I know there are no perfect solutions in life; but it doesn't mean that I just give up. Hell, if you ever do AI work you'll start to grasp this stuff. Everything is a non-linear approximation of some fuzzy goal where it's hard to define optimal success with certainty let along wondering the maze in the dark for the way out... we're all rats in the maze... or AI approximating equations beyond comprehension. Your thesis is probably along the lines of defeatism but with a religious belief that anarchy will yield produce as good results as continual attempts at "a more perfect union." I think perhaps you should explore anarchist thought... so should I... I've never read far in that direction because it's so absurd. Nature is all about complex systems (physics included) limiting chaos. Yes, we are attempting to play god, or nature in a way. we do that sort of thing all the time.
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