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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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
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.
My experience visiting California and trying to get my deposits back is that the locals use the deposit as a moral justification for littering. The general sentiment seems to be that leaving their bottles and cans left outdoors is a way for them to give to the homeless by letting them collect their litter and get the deposits back.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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
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.
Processes that don't make money are "failures"? Like the military?
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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 ?
...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.
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
Most metals can be recycled for a profit. Take a car battery in to the recyclers and see what they'll pay. Copper is another one that gets recycled straight off the pole along with manhole covers that are also recycled straight from the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
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.
No, the problem is that China got tired of being our dumping ground and decided to end the charade. So we can't pretend anymore that recycling saves money by simply offshoring our trash on-the-cheap to China and pretending that they're going to actually "recycle" it instead of just dumping it in a landfill.
Real recycling costs money. It doesn't save it. So if you want *real* recycling (instead of just shipping everything to some third-world country and patting yourself on the back), then it's going to cost you.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Americans need a lot more education. Hardly surprising that's the right answer for this.
No, education is not the answer. Educating people on proper trash sorting makes very little difference.
People just don't care, and any solution based on them caring is going to fail.
Even if you get 95% to care, the other 5% will throw random garbage in the recycling bin and contaminate it.
The solution is to automate trash sorting with AI and robotics. Then people can throw everything in one bin, and one truck can pick it up and take it to a central sorting hub, where the sorting can be done properly.
As long as you give the fair salary and don't use them as slaves.
But if you did would you choose them over others?
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.