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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?
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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 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.
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.
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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.
This is Slashdot. The proper title is "Sanitation Engineer." :-)
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.
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