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.

Comments

Recycling mostly a scam

[judoguy]

Some years ago my wife was at a seminar and sat next to the guy in charge of recycling for a good sized city. Hi explained to her that except for aluminum, the rest was a net loss after all the pollution from the trucks, energy expenditure, etc. was accounted for. It was a feel good measure forced by the city so they had something "environmental" to point to.

Recycling paper in particular takes so much water and chemicals that it makes no sense. All you're saving is trash pines, etc., that might be better just buried thereby sequestering some of the carbon.

Re:Recycling mostly a scam

[Strider-]

This has been know since time imamorial. The "Three Rs" have always been "Reduce, Reuse, Recyle" in that order. Recycling should be the last resort.

Where I live, bottled beer is sold in industry standard beer bottles. The brewery gets their bottles from the consortium, sticks their labels on it, fills it with beer, and puts their cap on it. At the other end of the waste stream, I turn in my beer bottles, get my $0.10 deposit back, and then the consortium takes the bottles, inspects them, cleans them, and sends them back to the brewery. On average, a given beer bottle will make it through the system 12 times before it gets lost, broken, or otherwise fails inspection.

We could do the same thing with all sorts of other products, but we don't.

Re: Recycling is a dead end

[danbert8]

2. Steel is also very economical to recycle, it's just not for households and consumers. But when you consider industrial scrap, iron and steel are the most recycled substance in the world.

Re: Recycling is a dead end

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aluminum-makers-ditch-can-business-11552834801?mod=hp_major_pos13

Very few aluminum products want recycled materials in the first place. And the costs are no longer there to bother with now.