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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.
Just get Mexico to pay for it
Maybe someone could build a wall out of all the recycled crap, and get Mexico to pay for that.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
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
If you don't want to pay to recycle then the solution is simple: include the cost of recycling something in the price. Simply put, the originator of the product should be charged the amount it costs to recycle their product.
As much as self-proclaimed Libertarians may hate this, this is actually a Libertarian solution because you are only paying for the damage you have done. Likewise, hardcore capitalists will complain this is government interference but we've seen how things go when the government doesn't regulate the environment. Furthermore, this is a market friendly opportunity as it will create recycling jobs as well as incentives to make low pollution and easily recyclable products.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's true that aluminum is the most profitable of residential recyclable resources. This is so well known that every evening when we put the trash out, a fleet of recyclers/looters make their way through our neighborhood in the dead of night and remove every single scrap of aluminum from all our recycling trash bins and recycle it directly. Waste Management then comes in the morning and collects all the paper / plastic / cardboard and has to do something with it. And we're surprised the programs are losing money?
Really, so you have never experienced the phenomenon that washing dishes is much easier if you do it right away instead of letting them sit for a week? Duh. The only way to get a clean recycling stream is by public relations. And Americans are often far worse than just not rinsing items. They often try to recycle all sorts of non-recyclable material. So it's not just "not clean" it's polluted with stuff that just isn't supposed to be there at all. If Americans can't be bothered to not put garbage in their recycling bins, they deserve to drown in their waste. (Seems like there is an adage for this...) My (American) city addresses this issue with sort-at-the-curb. If it isn't recyclable, they just leave it in the bin or toss it in the garbage can that is sitting right next to it so that the customer gets feedback. They also do PR at the schools to encourage responsible recycling. As a result, we have a much cleaner stream than most cities and both get more money for it and have a wider variety of places that will buy it.
So if a company can't make money of of cleaning up your mess, you should be exempt from doing it too?
Seems like a perfect example of economic analysis being insufficient analysis.
...may not be to everyone's liking, and for my part - it's a PAIN to do what we do, and it costs tons of money too so it's a real problem, but here's what we do:
In most of Sweden, sorting your trash at home is MANDATORY. If you don't, you can get a fine billed to you for the extra work the recycling plant took sorting it for you, and it's usually am 80$ fine for each offense.
We have roughly 12 bins (2 major bins with 4 sections each), Metal, Plastics, Colored glass, Uncolored glass, Small cartoons, newspapers/ads, Food, batteries, lightbulbs, deposits, combustible and collectables (the collectables you'll have to call for, and they pick up like once a month or something).
It's crazy expensive too, I pay roughly 400$ a year for this "service" where I have to sort everything myself, yet - the recycling companies / garbies if you like... are fighting over the resources because to them, they're really valuable.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
The true path to sustainability involves using more energy and less natural resources. Unfortunately, there is a common yet misguided ideal that we should minimize energy use through conservation and efficiency, and that expensive energy is good because it decreases demand. This kills recycling, desalination, synthetic carbon-neutral fuels/fertilizer, and other sustainability efforts. Worse yet, the preferred "natural" energy sources that are supposedly "free", require vast resource-intensive infrastructure to harness, store, and distribute. The massive environmental harm is tacitly accepted as necessary for saving the world, and if these efforts are scaled up, the results will be devastating.
It is rather remarkable how many have been blinded by dogma and propaganda, and can't even acknowledge the most basic tenet of minimizing resource use and impact on the natural world. Instead, the (fossil-funded) "green" lobby insist that we pave the world with renewables and continue their subsidies indefinitely, all without any plan or even a fund to manage their final disposition. The reality is that renewables only transform fossil energy and natural resources into a new waste stream. How can wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries ever be sustainable if we can't afford to recycle them?
Environmental impact is ultimately a function of energy density. Fission (and fusion) generate enormous amounts of energy from a tiny quantity of material, are produces even less waste, all of which is contained and self-funded by per-kWh fees. Advanced technologies are even more effective, and produce invaluable isotopes for medical and space applications. With rational policy, not only will it be the cleanest energy source, but also the cheapest. Then, economics alone will drive rapid decarbonization. Nuclear is already the safest by any objective measure, and even the very small risks can be virtually eliminated.