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US Recycling Companies Face Upheaval From China Scrap Ban (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: U.S. companies that collect waste for recycling are weighing higher prices and other changes to their operations since China upended the industry when it stopped accepting much of the scrap material Americans have been shipping there for decades. The top two solid waste services companies in the U.S., Waste Management Inc. and Republic Services Inc., both recently pulled back profit projections in their recycling divisions based on China's new policies, which have created a glut in scrap markets and sent global prices for scrap material plummeting.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., 31% of U.S. scrap commodity exports worth a total of $5.6 billion were sent to China last year. It was cheap for recycling collectors to send scrap to China because ocean carriers offered deeply discounted prices to get shipping containers back to Asia after they had arrived at U.S. ports packed with goods made in Chinese factories. "We were happy to send material back in them for pennies on the dollar," Mr. Coupland said. Now it's gotten more complicated. Mr. Coupland said Republic Services has found new buyers in Malaysia, India and other markets, but fewer ships make direct trips there from the U.S., driving up transportation costs. Global prices for used materials have plummeted, so Republic loses money on most of the recycled scrap it now sells overseas. That cost is increasingly likely to get passed along to U.S. households and businesses.
According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., 31% of U.S. scrap commodity exports worth a total of $5.6 billion were sent to China last year. It was cheap for recycling collectors to send scrap to China because ocean carriers offered deeply discounted prices to get shipping containers back to Asia after they had arrived at U.S. ports packed with goods made in Chinese factories. "We were happy to send material back in them for pennies on the dollar," Mr. Coupland said. Now it's gotten more complicated. Mr. Coupland said Republic Services has found new buyers in Malaysia, India and other markets, but fewer ships make direct trips there from the U.S., driving up transportation costs. Global prices for used materials have plummeted, so Republic loses money on most of the recycled scrap it now sells overseas. That cost is increasingly likely to get passed along to U.S. households and businesses.
Recycle = sending to a dump overseas
But at least it feels good to save the environment!
I'm not sure how much longer they are going to keep it up, but I just took in a UPS tonight for recycling and mentioned that I had removed the battery, thinking I would have to take it to a Batteries Plus or something. Nope, the customer service rep said they take all kinds of batteries, any that are rechargeable.
I personally very much appreciate the chance to recycle virtually anything electronic there at no charge whatsoever.
I know they will no longer take monitors or TVs for free, but I don't know of anywhere that does.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
There is NO WAY that his asshole can pucker or quiver. That banged out butthole hangs like a wizard's sleeve I guarantee!
blame it on the moon?.! keeping it brief~~
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just don't call it censorship..
Gotta love California. There is a service called Ynotrecycle, that will come to your address and pick up monitors for free.
http://www.ynotrecycle.com/
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If we're not reusing the materials ourselves, it's not real recycling.
Stop building garbage islands in the ocean. Deal with it properly.
Au contraire! With all his glory hole moonlighting he was able to pay for an anal rejuvenation procedure. His asshole is now as tight as a 4 year old boys.
Instead of throwing the cardboard each time use a durable box that is returned on the next delivery. Like in the old days, the milkman delivered milk in glass bottles that were reused
Now recycling companies will have to ACTUALLY RECYCLE. What a novel fucking concept. The amount of waste produced by our society is simply unacceptable and unsustainable at the rate we are going. If we are going to continue on the path of planned obsolescence, at the very least we need to maximize the recovery of valuable materials from the things we throw away. Our mines aren't going to last forever, and the minerals we have access to are finite.
Mark my words, in another 50-100 years, we're going to have to start mining landfills just so we can extract resources from all the junk we've thrown away over the years.
With China not accepting the recycling then maybe the US should ban importing the said products for recycling from China
What I'm seeing here is that scrap recycling stuff is cheap as hell right now ("prices plummeted")... considering that scrap and waste are not going away any time soon, this seems like THE mark in history to buy cheap scrap futures/stock now while I can. Mark my words and I'll link to this post from my Yacht in 20 years.
what if you could just feed aluminum cans and plastic bottles to your 3d printer and it could just recycle them directly into whatever you wanted?
vs shipping it away and forgetting about it..
now your screwed, as you don't have the infrastructure needed to cope with it all.
...so you're saying we CAN'T just dump our shit in China and let them deal with it?
That's so...unAmerican.
-Styopa
We should be happy we're getting the trash jobs back.
We used to take care in what we bought, what kind of containers etc. Then curbside recycling lead everyone to believe they could dump just about anything in and not feel guilty.
Well it was a false promise. We need to go back to looking at the packaging and choosing what to buy more carefully. Manufacturers need to use better packaging.
We Americans must have madly fallen in love with outsourcing
We outsourced our jobs to India and our waste to China, India, Malaysia.
If my ignorant neighbors would quit throwing their used paper towels and greasy pizza box bottoms into the recycling bin, maybe the US could manage to achieve China's more stringent contamination rate requirements for paper recyclables.
Not to mention people's habit of leaving liquid inside their drinking bottles and reinstalling the caps when throwing them into the recycle bin. C'mon guys, knock that stupid ignorant shit off.
I think we all pretty much understand that recycling being sent to Asia (whether China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, etc) either gets dumped into the ocean enroute or dumped across the slums in those countries. That whole scheme was an externality that Americans benefited from at the expense of others. Having China take the trash was so cheap, it also prevented development of better materials and processes around real recycling and reuse. Hopefully things like less packaging, cleaner packaging, compostables and fewer varieties of plastics used will now become more likely.
What if one could just throw ones waste directly into a Mr Fusion and get clean energy...
oh wait...
that was just a movie
sigh
You dumbass. Pass the consequences of your reckless entitled lifestyle on to your own kids, not mine.
Seriously? Are you americans really this dumb?
Much of the plastic collected for recycling in europe ends up to shady places in china and other less developed countries. In which the process of handling the waste is less than perfect.
http://www.thegwpf.org/new-rep...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
"It is feared that an increasing proportion of waste set aside for recycling is now being thrown into the sea."
I doubt the operators receiveing the waste make much difference with European waste and American waste. That is to say, most likely both will end to the environment. Shipping trash for recycling to some 3rd world country is a fraud. They may have cheap labor there, but I doubt they have the high tech and proper processes to handle everything cleanly and enviromental friendly way.
Create a new industry there, which will only benefit them and reduce the reason for leaving. It also gives a better place for us to send our recycling materials.
Just a thought.
Reduce -- Reuse -- Recycle ... in that order. Recycling should be the last resort after you have done the first two. By focusing on recycling, the U.S. has driven a bad cycle where one doesn't worry about being wasteful because it will all be recycled in the end. Think bottled water, not many people worry about all the water plastic from bottled water because the bottles will be recycled, right? It's like when you buy reduced calorie food and think to yourself that you can now eat more because it's reduced calorie rather than thinking that if you ate the same amount as usual you can reduce you caloric intake.
Indonesia? Laos? Cambodia? Disputed zone?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I am genuinely curious: why can China process scrap and we, for some reason, either cannot or simply refuse to. Mild pun meant.
The actual problem here is that plastic is almost impossible to recycle when it's not properly cleaned and separated. Which is only really possible to to at the point of origin. Essentially the person taking out his plastic trash will have to properly separate it and wash it.
Which is why countries where this is done, such as my native Finland exported almost none of their plastic to be recycled to China, and what we did, we still can export. Because people around here will literally wash their plastic garbage before taking it to the recycling bin. I mean literally wash it with water until it's reasonably clean. Which means that all that recycler has to do is to do a cursory check and then just fabricate it into pellets and it's good for reuse.
Which incidentally is what Chinese still gladly take.
What they will no longer take is general dirty plastic that is all but impossible to recycle without massive manpower investment.
There will need to be a massive cultural shift to actually get people in countries that used to export dirty plastic as "recyclable" to actually sort and wash their own plastic waste so it is actually recyclable at a reasonable cost. Before that, so called "recycling companies" that used to take dirty unsorted plastic and pretend to recycle it will have to go bust because their business model no longer works. And that is unlikely to be in near future, as there are plenty of poor Asian and African states that still have manpower that is exceedingly cheap to dig through landfill full of plastic, separate it, clean it and take it to a dealer.
When it comes to wood, paper, and cardboard, we should just bury it. I recall a well know scientist (not known well enough for me to remember his name right now) saying how we should sequester carbon by growing trees and using it for lumber, when we tear down the houses the wood should just be buried in a landfill. We'd be sequestering the carbon in the wood, and getting a valuable building material out of it. When/if that wood is no longer useful then lock that carbon in the ground by burying it in a landfill. I don't recall him saying we should do the same with other wood products but it makes sense to me that we should.
I remember my chemistry professor talking about how recycling plastic is wasteful. It's far simpler to burn the plastic in a power plant. Doing this avoids trucking this plastic around, all the sorting, and so forth. I had someone else tell me that dumping plastic in a landfill is a perfectly viable means of disposal. We aren't going to run out of holes to dump trash into, and that plastic came from the ground to begin with so putting it back can't be all bad, can it?
Metals and glass should be recycled, and they have been recycled since forever. Given the obvious energy saved in recycling metals over digging up ore this has been and always will be common practice.
I heard about how plastic drinking straw bans are becoming popular. Well it turns out this is based on bad data and the alternatives restaurants are providing are often worse for the environment. People with children will want a straw in their drink, or some other means to prevent spilled milk. A common alternative is a "sippy cup" lid, but these lids use far more plastic than if they put a straw in a thin plastic lid with a small hole for the straw. Solid plastic stirring sticks are given instead of straws in caffeinated and alcoholic drinks, again using more plastic. There's a reason bicycles are made out of metal tubes instead of solid metal bars, because a tube is stronger than a bar given the same amount of material.
I swear these hippies and their stupid ideas on "saving the planet" will get us all killed.
I remember when natural gas was going to save us all from dirty diesel fuel. All the buses had advertisements painted on them on how they burned "green" natural gas. Natural gas is largely methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and it seeps out of the ground into the air naturally. If we cap off all these places and suck in the natural gas to fuel our buses we turn this into a less potent greenhouse gases, water and CO2. Which gets back to where I started, if we grow trees then that water and CO2 gets turned into valuable building materials and sequesters the carbon. If we don't burn the natural gas, and stop cutting down trees for lumber, then we are making things worse.
Also they have stopped taking back Chinese people..to reduce population explosion.:).So now America is now left with glut of Chinese, how would they recycle them
Fifteen years ago, China could not afford to waste the equivalent of the USA's General Mining Act of 1872. Signed by Ulysses S. Grant to speed western expansion during Apache Indian Wars etc, GMA set price of extraction on Federal Lands at $5 per acre, no royalties, no cleanup cost (14 of 15 largest USA Superfund Sites are hard rock mines on federal land). At least, China was not willing to let Australian, EU and USA mining and forestry companies operate on Chinese land without those subsidies. Recycling therefore won in the marketplace.
Today China is trying to develop virgin material extraction industry to compete with BHP, Alcoa, etc., and has the capital.
So the value of raw materials that had already been refined (value added) could be recognized by hand much more cheaply than extraction, but China CP now sees development of virgin material as a priority. What the WSJ article fails to consider is China's experience with rare earth metals - they can ban export and import, but remove the ban whenever someone else invests in competing with them. Right now, the prices of recycled scrap have dropped to a point where I'd expect China to start buying them again. Then ban them if the price goes up (using raw materials supplies they have developed). Just like USA refnining industry did to scrappers in the 1950s and 60s. Usually recyclables collected are not wasted, it's a question of price, and Chinese buying gave USA scrappers a lot of relief 15 years ago from the price command and control power of USA raw material purchasers. Like rare earth metal mining, this is about leverage.
Gently reply
My trash/recycle company has instructed us to wash our recyclables.
We run them through the dishwasher or hand wash them. Is the hot water worth it?
I told her to cancel the recycle service - may be she will now because of this story.
In the meantime, I'm trying to stop buying crap in plastic. It's proving to be impossible. It would be great to eliminate the problem in the first place.
Parent... but nearly all humans too:
You have the ability to choose sources who stoke your ego but you ultimately hurt yourself and possibly others (whether you have the "right" is seriously debatable.)
Facts can be found which help almost any side; cogent arguments can also be found as well-- not a priority for most people. The #1 thing is to feel good and people won't admit they do that; they'll spent more mental effort rationalizing their irrational behavior because it's a defensive survival emotion driving their brain.
If you want to seek the actual WHOLE truth instead of letting your animal nature filter all your perception, you will seek out sources which make you feel BAD. Not upset/outraged because that perversely releases good brain chemicals too... It all comes down to dealing with depression in the end.
Environmentalists CARE more; emotions DO cloud judgement while they provide necessary motivation. Double edged sword. They can like everybody else be herded down wrong paths and cling to wrong ideas; especially ones with significant investment. Not that it is always bad to do so, one should have a stronger attachment to positions they know more about and not be a flip flopping dotard.
Nuclear power is a highly politically corrupt industry with a lot of propaganda; solar hasn't grown enough to compete and the decentralized nature of wind/solar along with the limited use of hydro makes the alternative industries less corrupting; therefore, less powerful. Trash is always highly political and poorly monitored.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
My garbage company already sent a nasty letter saying the price would go up on the next bill due to recycling costs, they specifically mentioned China lol. While I am complaining, how does it help the environment to send out a second fleet of trucks just for recycling? Thats how this company does it. Also in this area garbage collection is still private (we have choice and competition yay!) but all that does is result in 4-5 trucks coming by every week instead of 1, now that is environmental efficiency.
... a big issue especially in the US is that we don't burn our trash anymore. Now to be clear when I advocate for burning trash, I'm advocating for burning it at a very high temperature of around 3000 degrees as they typically do in Western Europe.
This statement gets a knee jerk reaction from people that don't understand waste disposal. To get around some of the initial assumptions, I'll point out that burning trash is actually a big part of waste disposal in Europe and used to be a big part of waste disposal in the US... though when we did it, it was at a low temperature.
We used to burn our trash at the temperature of an open flame. Very basic. And most Americans actually used to burn their trash AT HOME and a big part of waste pick up was collecting ashes. In my grand father's day everyone would burn trash at home, dump the ashes in bins, and the garbage truck would come every OTHER week to get it.
This practice was believed to contribute to poor air quality so burning trash was discouraged in the US. Today we don't burn it at home and it isn't burned at the land fill. It is instead compacted and basically mummified in land fills. That whole thing about some things lasting ten years or more before they break down is because they're packed into airless, lightless, watertight piles where organisms can't break down the trash easily.
An alternative is burning the trash at a very high temperature of about 3000 degrees where the combustion is much more complete and you don't get many complex emissions. Generally at that temperature you don't get much from hydrocarbon trash besides CO2 and water vapor. Most toxic compounds don't survive that temperature. Heavy metals etc remain an issue but the idea is to bury the ashes so it doesn't really matter. Also, it should be noted just for clarity that that is a zero sum game. You're going to have that stuff in the trash regardless.
Ash takes up less space than compacted non-burned garbage. If properly filtered... as in removing the trash that contains things like heavy metals... you can use the ashes for fertilizer. You can also generate electricity. In a few Western European countries they actually IMPORT trash from other countries as fuel for domestic power production from waste disposal.
Now, I know some people are concerned about CO2. Well, that's another zero sum game because EVEN if you don't burn the trash and instead just mummify it in the ground, it will still break down over 50 years or so... and that process will release pretty much everything that would have been released by burning it on day one. Mathematically, over time the difference between burning it on the day and having it release the gas over 50 years is the same. If you add to the pile every day and it releases the gas as material is added to it a little bit over time... then the emissions per day ultimately will equal the same as the emissions if you burn it. It is a zero sum game.
Only if you land fill the compacted trash you generally don't get power out of it and even if you get some natural gas it is much less than what you get if you burn it... it also takes up way more space... and it is much harder to recycle the waste into compost and fertilizer.
What I am saying is that we should be burning the trash at 3000 degrees. All the negatives are shared by any of the other alternatives and thus are irrelevant because we can't avoid those consequences. We do however get more net positives.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Unfair trade? Fine, take back your trash.
It is long past time for all of the west to deal with our own trash. In particular, all of the electronics contains valuable elements. These can be torn apart via robotics, burned, etc to obtain elements
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Like here @44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3000 degrees, I'm sure. Much better than the trash compactors on the Death Star.
Recycling = shipping it to China. Nobody really gives a fuck about recycling anyways. Itâ(TM)s all some feel good crap for mellinials ok?
I always make sure I put extra cat shit in the recycle can in the hopes that it makes it to China.
Can we recycle that racist cunt Sarah Jeong?
Maybe cancel Sarah Jeong huh?
I won't be washing plastic to recycle it. In 20 years I'll be lucky if I have water to wash myself. I suppose we could be building desalanization plants water infrastructure but, well, there's no political will to raise the taxes to pay for it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You have just already paid for it..
How do so many people have the mental disconnect that allows them to think things are 'free' when really the cost is just being spread, and often hugely inefficiently?
Tell me, how is the 'free' education in California going these days..
Well enough that the economy in California is booming. I don't see that the cost of education in California is substantially better or worse than any other state in the US. While the cost of education in the US in general is out of sight crazy granted. How is the cost of 'free' education in '(insert your state)' ?
https://www.politifact.com/cal...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
We pay the City to recycle plastic, paper, metal and glass in a single container. We also pay the City for water. Water is pretty cheap, but California is in a constant drought condition, so wasting it is wrong. In some places water is really expensive. It's not ignorance, it's just basic economics. We PAY to have our recyclables picked up and recycled. Somebody is making a profit, shouldn't THEY be the ones to clean up the dirty stuff?
There is no way I am going to wash out a plastic peanut butter jar before I toss it in the recycling bin. If I had a dishwasher I might consider using it, but *I* am the dishwasher.
Which is more evil -- to waste plastic or to waste water?
After over 60 years, China continues to cost me money. It only moves in one direction: from my pocket to the CPC.
I know we've all been raised on the recyclist propaganda; but, could we just stop it already?
Paper: The largest land owner in my home state, NC, is a forester. The raise southern pine trees for the paper and wood industries. Trees are a CROP plant. The paper, plywood, and lumber industries do NOT want trees from old growth forests. They want trees that are all of the same size, have been grown to be straight, and will go through their equipment with the minimum of attention. On the back end, landfills are living systems. Lined with clay, and covered with plastic, enzymes are pumped through the waste to produce methane that is burned to produce electricity. Effectively, there is no paper waste.
Plastic: Some enzymes have been discovered in the past few years that are effective at breaking down plastic molecules. These will soon go into the enzyme mix to make plastic as productive as paper.
Long story short, today the normal waste cycle IS recycling. Stop wasting money and resources on a separate truck to drive around to take the waste to the same place.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba