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As Costs Skyrocket, More US Cities Stop Recycling (nytimes.com)
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; syndicated source]. From a report: Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents' recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it. Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
"We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now," said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities. Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions. The turmoil in the global scrap markets began affecting American communities last year, and the problems have only deepened.
"We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now," said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities. Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions. The turmoil in the global scrap markets began affecting American communities last year, and the problems have only deepened.
I was an avid recycler, until the day I watched the garbage man (He was, so not sexist.) throw my carefully sorted recyclables into the truck right next to all the trash. Then push the compact button.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Just get Mexico to pay for it
then throw it in the landfill and let it, you know, compost. In my community they decided they would impose mandatory recycling using these huge bins twice as big as a garbage can. Paying the extra cost is required. So every week a separate fleet of garbage-truck sized diesel powered vehicles traverses every neighborhood, making a lot of noise and creating a lot of pollution, so we can all recycle. And you dare not put a used pizza box in with the rest of the cardboard because pizza boxes, by definition (even if they are pristine and unstained) do not count as recycleable. At the end of the run a huge machine somehow separates all this recycled stuff into appropriate piles for distribution to--somewhere. No one knows where it goes. But damn you feel good about saving the planet.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Sure, in whatever shit hole backwards country you live in you can do that. But here in America, thanks to our strict freedom from mental healthcare (Go Reagan!), we are smart enough to have people willing to demonstrate the danger of refuse. For example, did you know a high temperature stable but weak acid extended exposure dissolvable transparent wax can be used to seal toxins to the bottom of a beer or soda bottle?
Of course not because you lock up and "treat" people that do that. Murican freedom lets us live in fear of them poisoning us when they are not hiding razor blades in apples around Halloween.
More seriously, yeah short cycle recycling/reuse is great, but our "ten cents less is worth shipping the job out of state mentality" allows bigger companies to push for laws to restrict smaller operations from doing that.