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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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Processes that don't make money are "failures"? Like the military?
I don't respond to AC's.
...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
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.