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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
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.
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.
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?
Cardboard (Corrugated and not) is pretty much second only to metals in terms of recycling, and most of that is done domestically.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
...so you're saying we CAN'T just dump our shit in China and let them deal with it?
That's so...unAmerican.
-Styopa
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.
Ironically, your yacht was broken up for scrap in 2034.
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.
If you want to talk "used to"s, we used to buy things that were high quality, durable and repairable and keep them for generations. Recycling was as simple as handing it down.
When people don't produce things for a living, they don't know how to recognize the quality under the pretty paint. That secondary effect is compounds the loss of the industries.
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.
It's more about consumerism than the quality of the products - nobody keeps a phone for generations no matter how good the quality is. Ads convince us that we need the newest thing and when a holiday comes around we're forced to buy it for ourselves or others.
What we really need is a war on Christmas. Also Amazon.
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.
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
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.
That's Dr. Patrick Moore.
http://ecosense.me/2017/01/10/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dr. Moore was an early member of Greenpeace. He had to leave because the organization was losing sight of the science behind environmental protection and people in the organization stopped listening to him. Dr. Moore was originally anti-nuclear power but now sees nuclear power as valuable for reducing human impact on the environment. He's not a fan of wind and solar power.
It seems that recycling glass and plastic are bad ideas, we should just put them in a landfill. Also bad for the environment is "organic" farming.
http://ecosense.me/2017/01/18/...
"People say you can't recycle too much. It turns out you can," says Mr. Porter, president of the environmental consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center, near Washington, D.C. "If you spend enough money, you can recycle anything. That doesn't mean you should."
The recycling center near me stopped taking plastic bags, when I asked what I should do with them I was told to just toss them in the trash. So, that's what I did and that's what I plan to do in the future.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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
Okay, atomic wanker.
Meet Klaus Traube, former nuclear engineer who knew more about it than you will ever know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
Yes, hot water is worth it.
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.
My yacht was broken up in 1993, after the US Navy sold it to the Australian Navy for parts, and they sent it to the breakers in Bangladesh after they'd pulled what they wanted. For my time on the yacht (back in early 70s), I earned one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Navy-To...
There's some truth in what you say, but some of it is not so truthy. My parents' cars back in the 60s were lucky to last 90,000 miles. (At least that's what the odometers said; I suppose they could have been turned back.) Back to the future: my 91 Corolla had enough miles on it when I finally sold it to have gone to the Moon (at perigee), and it was still driveable. My wife's 99 Camry is looking like it will do the same, and most of the other cars I've owned recently are similar (a few got into accidents, and durability and repairability kind of go out the window with that--but they were well past 90k miles by then). In sum, cars are much higher quality, and more durable than they used to be. Not sure how to qualify their repairability, since at least the ones I've had don't seem to require many repairs.
Of course, having enough miles to go to the Moon is nothing compared with Musk's car... And Cuba seems to keep those old cars running.
Longevity of desktop computers is hard to measure. The one that I'm typing this on is sort of like the ship of Theseus. I've replaced the power supply, the hard drive (with an SSD drive--the old hard disk was still working, but the SSD drive gave it an incredible boost in performance), the mother board, a fan, and the box; what's left is the memory and keyboard. Is it the same computer?
Obviously there are exceptions; refrigerators, dish washers, clothes washers and dryers don't seem to last (I replaced a dish washer a couple years ago, rather than replacing the pump). But it's hard to compare the longevity of dish washers, since my parents didn't have one (they had me).
Like here @44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3000 degrees, I'm sure. Much better than the trash compactors on the Death Star.
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/
Cars have definitely improved, and I believe will hit the point where most are obsolete or wrecked before they wear out with the electric generation. But those are heavily recycled.
I'm thinking of things like appliances which have seen a huge drop but more things like clothes, tables, chairs, sofas, dressers, beds, children's toys that used to last generations, toy boxes, etc. Tons of the common everyday household items have severely degraded in durability.
I've seen sofas go for 50 years with one reupholstering but saw a recent one that was not cheap get thrown away after 6 because a cheap OSB board used in its construction had busted and it was not easily repairable.
In another case, a delivery man warned on a very expensive hide-a-bed that we should be careful to pull the hide-a-bed out evenly because the support bars were known to bend otherwise creating a non-level sleeping surface that had been the cause of many returns. The support "bars" were very thin tubular metal.
The dumpsters where I live are routinely filled with furniture being thrown away. Many throw away everything rather than moving it when they leave.
And you're making the exact mistake that everybody today seems to make - short term thinking. If you look at the cost of always having a sofa over your lifetime for example, buying four or five cheap trash ones instead of one that lasts your lifetime and can be handed down is a very different comparison. The one that lasts a lifetime is much cheaper.
When I left home in the 80s, most of the furniture I took with me had been handed down to my parents by my grandparents and was still in perfect condition though few would want to lift it. It weighs a ton. From my point of view, that wasn't just cheap, it was free. My parents replaced it with furniture they still have because they were raised to recognize quality. None of that furniture has yet touched a landfill and my grandparent's furniture was first purchased in the 40s.
And as for your recognition of quality example, as a programmer I can generally recognize quality from one language to the next. Expertise is a different thing. Specifics don't disprove generalizations. In general, I have observed most younger people today judge quality at the surface. I've seen very few feel how heavy something is, turn it over and see how it is made, put your weight on furniture and see if it has any flimsiness, etc. Fifty years ago, that's the type of thing you usually did.
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 ?
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