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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.
In a way this shift is good news, because it was all to easy before to throw a ton of crap into the recycling bin and pretend a problem was handled.
We are just now getting to a realistic point where we can truly decide what it makes sense to recycle, and what is really trash. Then we can make better choices about what things are made of, or what packaging they have. Like maybe paper products are not so bad, as we see with the rise of things like paper straws... remember how plastic used to be preferred over paper, and there was a big shift to move to plastic bags?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, it's a very profitable industry. The problem in the US is that people want the benefits without putting in the work.
No one takes the time to look at the number of the plastic before throwing it into the but. No one wants to read the instructions from the rate management company. Most people don't even realize you cannot throw contaminated materials into the recycling bin.
What makes recycling expensive in the US is the amount of effort required to clean up the material being recycled. It's a manual process, and very expensive.
What's killing recycling in the US is laziness!
Recycling is good, it's good conservation and makes good economic sense. What went wrong is single stream and not investing in the technology. We need to recycle where we can and stop just burning it or burying it, it's not that hard.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It's the old story where the first world takes advantage of the third world while claiming to be doing the right thing.
We were, for all practical intents and purposes, taking advantage of China and sending them what amounted to be mostly garbage. At the time, their companies could pay people a pittance to sort through it - and, If it wasn't recyclable, they ended up tossing it into their own garbage dumps. Eventually as China has developed, they got to the point where they didn't want everyone else's trash.
Now, the real dilemma is that while many people may want to recycle in theory, they don't want to pay the true cost of recycling. There is significant processing to be done if we want it to actually work, but we seem to think it should be no more expensive than just tossing stuff into the landfill - but turns out there's no such thing as a free lunch.
#DeleteChrome
If the cost of cleaning and separating recyclables at the waste processing facility is too high to make it worthwhile, then the same is true of pre-sorted and washed recyclables. It just pushes that cost to the individual waste stream sources, which is great for recycling companies, but not so great for anyone else.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Actually, it's a very profitable industry.
Recycling is indeed profitable, but not for all materials. Here is a complete exhaustive list of the materials that can be recycled economically:
1. Aluminum
No one takes the time to look at the number of the plastic before throwing it into the but.
They do not, and they are not going to in the future either. If we are going to make recycling work, it can not be based on people being anonymously altruistic, and attentive to details of cleaning and sorting their trash. It is NOT going to happen.
The answer is automation. We need intelligent trash-sorting robots.
Projecting much?
My recycler flat out sent a letter their recycling program was going up because China wasnâ(TM)t buying it/paying as much.
Sorting isnâ(TM)t a challenge. Itâ(TM)s just not as profitable so now itâ(TM)s being tossed.
If the state ever gets rid of these ridiculous deposit prices, you can pretty much kiss recycling goodbye.
And you just explained why they put this fee structure to begin with.
Well, a less cynical statement (and one I've heard from folks in similar positions) is that what specific materials are economical to recycle varies over time, and it's not practical to ask the general population to continually change what they do (or do not) put in the recycle bin. It makes more sense to have all recyclable materials collected into a separate stream, even if some percentage of them end up in the landfill.
#DeleteChrome
At some point, the human race is going to have to quit making disposable plastic. We are literally poisoning ourselves with our own waste. I don't think that most people take kindly to being told that they're going to have to adjust their quality of life (or at least convenience) downwards, but that's what it's going to take in order for the human race to survive on Earth in the not too distant future.
I don't respond to AC's.
I have always wondered what the affluence to efficiency ratio is for a country. Has the USA become so rich it can't do basic things like recycle anymore?
The USA has lots of resources in its country, let it use them as fast as it can and burn as brightly as it can. In the future the world will be a much more scares place and then it can buy everything it needs.
I don't recycle for just me. I recycle for my great-grandchildren, and yours.
OH man..what I'm sad about is, that you felt that you actually had to apologize for using the common time honored term "garbage man".
Wow...we're hitting new lows on PC-ness, aren't we.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Processes that don't make money are "failures"? Like the military?
I don't respond to AC's.
That ignores a fundamental problem in the US. The EPA has been stonewalling heavy industry since Obama started the war on coal. Permits are almost impossible to achieve, particularly emissions permits. It would make a shit ton of sense to separate with a pair of magnets (steel and aluminum), float out the plastic and paper, and burn those for energy, landfill the heavies. That would be a huge first step. There are techniques to automatically sort plastics, but they're expensive and probably not profitable.
However, that doesn't achieve the green objective of punishing the westerners, isn't possible due to the obstructionist regulators, and makes way too much sense for the Republicans to fund it, so it's DOA.
Or just force companies to stop using plastic as a disposable product. Glass and paper are not a problem
Not exactly. You assume that "cleaning up" ends up as a net benefit, which isn't necessarily true. If it costs more to clean up recycling than the end product is worth, then you're ultimately spending more in other limited resources (energy, water, labor, etc.) to recycle it than you are saving. It can end up being a net negative, both economically and ecologically. Instead, we would be better off working to reduce the total amount of waste by making one-time use packaging more efficient and switching to durable reusable packaging where possible.
Knowledge Brings Fear
What ever happened to water conservation anyway? Am I still supposed to suffer with low flow bathroom fixtures while rinsing all my recyclables?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Say...whaaaat??!! Let me understand this correctly. Are you saying that smelting ORE is CHEAPER than melting down scrap aluminum? There must be some economic dynamics here that has nothing to do with energy savings.
Life is not for the lazy.