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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.
It won't save the planet. It only costs money.
Corporatism != Free Market
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.
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
Just get Mexico to pay for it
Okay so
>China buys trash for cheap
>Marked costs are now artificially high inside of USA
>China stops buying trash
>Marked almost collapses
Is this even a recycle issue?
You cannot recycle mixed plastics and there is no way to separate them.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
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.
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"
The sea life won’t eat it I promise.
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
Miners can take raw material from the Earth and sell it at a profit to people who use it to make cans, bottles, and so on.
But, you have to PAY someone to take your cans, bottles, and so on, so they can make more cans, bottles, and so on out of them.
Why are virgin raw materials profitable, but post-consumer materials lossy? It's easier and cheaper to make a new can out of a pile of old cans than it is to make a can out of aluminum oxide ore.
Why does this supply chain have a reverse economy? Producers of aluminum cans should be falling all over themselves trying to buy used aluminum cans, because it costs 70% less to produce an aluminum can from an aluminum can than it does to dig a bunch of ore out of the ground.
Except, it doesn't cost 70% less. It costs more. Way more. How could that possibly be? What could possibly be adding so much to the cost of this supply chain, which by all right should be taking over the material economy like a California wildfire?
Oh right. I forgot. The answer is obvious. It's government! Or, more precisely, the CHINESE government! See, America does not produce for herself anymore. She has become so dependent upon China for so much, that her citizens are beholden to the whim of a bunch of commie pinko bureaucrats in filthy, rotting cesspool of human misery that is Beijing.
China decided a couple of years ago that US recyclables were not clean enough, so started rejecting them. Since America is not capable of recycling her own stuff, she must rely on China. Now that she can't do that, there is nobody who can actually create post-consumer material, and therefore there is no demand for 'recyclable' material.
Hence, the need to PAY someone to take it, where it just ends up in a different landfill.
Recyclable paper that is deposited at my local trash dropoff are trucked to somewhere in Georgia where they are incinerated. Bottles and cans are taken to Mexico by train where they might be cleaned and sent to China for recycling. My county pays over $1M/year for disposal of recyclable material to keep it out of our own landfill, which has reached capacity 20 years before it was anticipated.
We Americans sure make a lot of garbage. Oh the joys of a consumerist economy.
State of California charges you a deposit for every bottle and can, and it really adds up. You don't get that money back when you throw it in the WM bins, so I have to take bags of aluminum and plastic to a facility 12 miles away (since all the local ones went out of business, and no I don't live in the sticks) just to get some of my money back. If it weren't for the fact I'd be throwing money away, the only thing I'd ever consider recycling is the aluminum, since it is actually less energy intensive to recycle it than to produce new. If the state ever gets rid of these ridiculous deposit prices, you can pretty much kiss recycling goodbye.
Where I live we have one large bin that everything goes in. We rely on someone else sorting into individual commodities.
in japan they meticulously sort the recyclables and deliver to community bins. Of course they also aren't lazy like us Americans.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Maybe municipal recycling is dead, but recycling itself is not. I knew that steel is a highly recycled material, actually thought it was the most recycled. But I now see that recycled Asphalt is used in most new roads. I also see mulch is another item that is recycled a lot. So, no. Recycling is not dead.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
One diesel truck for the garbage; one diesel truck for the recycling. Need a landfield for garbage. Need big installations for recycling (people to sort the recycled trash, machines to process it, diesel lift, ....). Another trucks to take sorted recycled stuff and transport it somewhere else. Explain to me where is the real environmental gain?
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
If one follows the detailed guidelines in cleaning materials to be recycled, there is a tremendous waste of water --- a most valuable resource, and with all the fracking and destruction of aquifers occurring, a possibly diminishing resource?
https://turbofuture.com/misc/recycled-materials-list-examples/
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
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.
We can always try consuming less... try reducing trash to the same amount over 2 weeks rather than 1 week... reduce energy consumption below the average usage...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
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.
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.
We are on the verge of self-driving cars being commonplace. I see no reason why we cannot train robots to sort garbage.
One of the major advantages of recycling is that it diverts refuse away from landfill. But having to ship it overseas for processing seems silly. With enough automation, we can reprocess recyclables closer to the point of collection.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This is one move in the tariff negotiations between the US and China, which are still in the "playing chicken" stage.
(IMHO progress stalled when the loss of the House made Trump look weak, but will no doubt pick up again shortly - probably real soon if the state-of-emergency veto is upheld and/or if the Mueller investigation report comes out and it's "didn't find squat". But negotiations finish when they finish and don't always succeed.)
I expect that if/when an agreement is reached, China will be undo the "we will bury you - in your own rubbish" ban and business will return to the previous normal.
If not, and there IS enough money to be made from it (I doubt China was handing kilotons of our recyclables at a loss just to be nice), somebody else will step up. But nobody's about to invest megabux building another recycling operation right now if they think China will restart and dominate the market before it's even complete.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The podcast 99% Invisible released an episode last month covering this shift in recycling, and what might have pushed China's change in policy.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
What the fuck are you replying to ?!? Maybe your message makes sense in a parallel universe, but not in this conversation.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Actual BIG problems:
1) mixed recycling = contamination. We can't export our paper because it's hardly worth bothering over burning it, it's too DIRTY.
2) Sorting adds costs. Pre-sorting reduces labor, error rates, and significantly reduces contamination and mixing.
3) Quality of recycling. even the best... aluminum has huge problems getting quality high enough that major users pay MORE for new aluminum instead!
4) Supported materials. Too many types of plastic; too hard to sort and MOST are not recycled simply because you can't easily identify it. Plastic bags are NOT WORTH the energy waste and are best properly burned for fuel. Many recyclable materials are NOT supported in your area. Mixing plastics doesn't work... Oh, the number of times you can perfectly recycle a plastic bottle is quite limited.
Recycling is supposed to be the responsible thing to do; it's not solely for profits. If it comes down to a form of tax or regulation, so be it:
BAN all plastic containers except 1 type. No need for a symbol, it's a bottle so you know. For exceptions, it has to be so extremely simple an AI can sort it out. Make people sort again. Use computer tracking to CHARGE people who mess it up. Ban labels that can not be recycled/removed from containers; make some things GLASS... require store refill options. WHY do I need my local store to plastic wrap food I'm going to put into a container at home anyway? May as well use my container or take a deposit on theirs. We used to have deposits and also live without plastic... not saying ban all plastic... but it lasts way too long... so it's a major contributor.
Even rock salt has microplastic in it!! sea salt is the worst BTW.
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I've spent years in Antarctica where the recycling was incredibly strict for various reasons (piss and shit went to different toilets, to give you an idea...) and there was one person almost full time just to tell the 12 others people where to throw things in the 30 or so different thrash cans ! If it's that complicated it just can't work unless you automate the shit out of the sorting or burn everything together and then sort the dust out in a mass spectrometer.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Shift 100% of the cost of dealing with packaging off to the manufacturers instead of the municipalities.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
...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.
I never thought moving to plastic packaging for some things was a good idea. RTE cereal in particular was just fine in wax paper bags, as it was 40 years ago. The darned plastic ones are incredibly hard to open without tearing them anyway.
1. The main reason why we can't ship our recycling to other nations is very simple. It's not sorted. In Japan, they have bundles of each of the types of materials, about 40 of them, into which you have to place CLEAN, DRY, CORRECT materials. And, strangely, they burn the rest. We're just lazy.
2. In many countries the literal manufacturers of the packaging and containers HAVE TO RECYCLE IT AT NO COST to the consumers. For some reason, we treat negative impacts (bads) of capitalism as if they don't exist. Change that. Everywhere.
3. It's not "Recycle cause I'm lazy". It's REDUCE, REUSE, and then the small amount left over RECYCLE. Fix that.
4. When Seattle went to recycling, we also went to putting vegetable and meat compost in our yard waste. Nowadays, if you go down any urban street on garbage day you see a tiny garbage bin and giant recycling and yard waste/compost bins. The main problem with recycling is: people put stuff they think MIGHT be recyclable (it's plastic but lead painted) or COULD be recyclable (metal container with a plastic painted rim). And they never put all the plastic bags inside other plastic bags so the individual bags get caught in the sorting plant machinery.
5. You're. Just. Lazy. (yes, I said that before, but I figured you need to hear it again, cause you're lazy)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Why is recycling a cost? The glass gets reused. Metal gets sorted. Plant material is used. Material that can't be sorted goes to a traditional landfill.
What are US cities using their money for? Moving waste around should not be an onerous task for any US city considering their tax rates and other spending.
Pensions?
Services for non citizens?
Education?
Roads?
Police?
Welfare?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We need to recycle here, or follow Europe's example and burn the rubber/plastic.
Fact is, that sending this off makes little sense. Lets recycle what is economical; Store in old mines what CAN be economical in the future and burn the rest.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sane environment has a price. If you cur corners and burn everything, you will have to pay it somehow at some time.
Funny how kids cartoons can somehow become reality afterall...
China allowed the politically incorrect importing foreign trash, think about the public sentiment if the US start importing trashes from 3rd world country, because it was a WTO concession to enjoy "unfair" benefits like requiring joint ventures and tech transfer; it is a business deal that the American public has enjoyed.
Americans should stop whining China stealing manufacturing jobs, which are among the lowest classes of jobs there that only poor rural migrants (known as min gong) do, and start taking up these new jobs of trash processing and scavenging.
Amen. The retail cost of a product should include the cost of responsible disposal, which in most cases will involve recycling or composting.
Such a program would align consumer incentives with environmental reality. It would reward producers who use minimal packaging and environmentally friendly or easily recycled materials.
A responsible disposal fee would drastically change the shape of prices. Natural products - unpackaged vegetables, raw lumber, milk in reusable glass bottles, etc - would not increase in price at all. Simple products like a metal screwdriver with plastic handle will see only a very small price rise. Whereas complicated, toxic, difficult to recycle products like electronic gadgets might see huge price increases. Those huge price increases will motivate producers to build less toxic, longer lasting, easier to recycle, easier to repair products.
The disposal surcharge should include several components: A recovery fee paid to the person who brings the product into an appropriate disposal facility. A disposal fee paid to the company that recycles the product. This can be modeled on the very successful bottle deposit programs run in many states. And a fee paid into an insurance fund, to cover the cost of cleaning up this kind of product when it is not responsibly disposed.
Back in the 70s, a dairy worker brought milk in a glass jug once or twice a week. We bought soda pop in glass bottles and would get a few pennies back per bottle upon returning them to the store. Back then, they washed and reused the containers. Today, automation is way better than it used to be. Why is it so insurmountable to automate cleaning glass bottles and bringing back a system that doesn't introduce so many plastic bottles to begin with?
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
If someone walked up to you and said, "hey, wash your garbage", it wouldn't be unreasonable to push them around while relentlessly mocking them for talking nonsense.
I've no problem separating my trash so long as it's a reasonably simple and straightforward process. Which goes up to "glass, plastic and metal here, everything else there", and no further. If I need to figure out what kind of plastic it is, then I won't bother. And I will absolutely not be washing my garbage. A quick rinse of a milk jug so my trash doesn't stink is my limit for cleaning things that I'm throwing out. Cleaning the things I want to keep is trouble enough.
I want to recycle. I think we're wasting too much useful stuff by burying it. What I'm not willing to do is jump over the hurdles currently in place.
If we are going to recycle, it needs to be easy. No worrying about whether a plastic bag is going to destroy the plant, no cleaning things we're trying to get rid of, and the least amount of consumer-side separation possible. People just aren't going to put up with having to do any more than that.
You're old enough to have at least heard about the recycling trucks that use to pick up separated items? Easier for a robot to pick up boxes of different types and split them than try to separate a mix of items. BESIDES you cross contaminate and it RUINS all the paper. Most my local paper is NOT recycled because it's ruined. Mine probably is because it's in nice bundles for the min-wage workers to sort out.
We hire a lot of humans to sort the stuff over here. it started out cheaper only because China didn't care. Then China started caring years ago and now they have to pay more to hire sorters. If we sorted and had separate bins they'd not need those people or have a much harder AI sorting problem.
REGULATION. You can't dump your car batteries in the trash; if they catch you it's a fine. AI cams etc will make enforcement far better than now. They can add more to the list of things not allowed.
A LITTLE labor by us saves $$ down the road. plus we can't use the recycled stuff because it's in such bad shape. Do you realize what kind of a MESS it is to sort the trash bins full of mixed items? I've actually seen my local plant and it's not so easy for humans to do quickly and forget about AI. They pick out only the most simple items and let the rest go. If you simply put them into separated bins they'd have it easy.
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Post industrial era, we now have recycled materials. I just wonder if post information era we will have companies in the business of rehashing old ideas.