Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble. How does it work?
mashable.com
mashable.com
There's still some manual picking involved in most plants. Robots are taking that over at a few plants.[2]
Aluminum is the moneymaker. Plastic bottles can go to a plant that turns them back into pellets for making new bottles.[3] A huge plant now serves southern California. Not clear this makes money.
Waste paper isn't that valuable. "Peak paper" was a while back, and US paper mills have been closing for years. It's not that sorting is hard, it's that the product is so low-value.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gjUpDnJrZA [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAr4BZM_Tzk
Plain white office paper might not be so valuable, but cardboard remains valuable enough that in Eastern Europe you can see marginalized communities like the Roma collecting it daily. I have seen recycling centers advertise payments like 0.50€/kg in exchange for cardboard, which seems pretty high.
The burning isn't relevant (it's better than landfill in a lot of circumstances), it's that introducing virgin materials to the waste pool is cheaper than reuse, for many materials.
Better than all that of course is re-use. When I was a child, in the UK, large glass bottles of lemonade had a 20p deposit, refundable on return. I believe I believe it is still common in Germany. This went away in the UK because large super-markets didn't want the hassle of dealing with returns, IIRC
You, yourself, might have enough responsibility and self-control to prioritize cleaning your containers, but this is not true for all humans. The store would lose business if their competitor sold milk already in bags or boxes, but you had to bring your own milk bag to their store. And someone's bags might have bacterial or other contaminants and get them sick, then they blame the store and get the health department to shut them down. (Tangent: Why is most milk still sold in boxes, and not in plastic?)
Glass is fragile, metals cause unexpected chemical reactions, wood is permeable & requires additional materials (wax, glue) to seal properly, and cardboard has poor durability.
There is a lot of completely unnecessary packaging that companies use because it gets them a 0.02% increase in profit and they don't have to pay the actual costs of the plastic pollution they are creating
I’m for allowing for ways to not use so much plastic. The technology exists - for instance, the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me one at a time and at the time they leave their container. It’d take take some doing, but it’s doable. For people not willing or able to provide a container then sell them the old plastic covered cubes of oatmeal in boxes two at a time. And charge them more.
The Internet of Things can help this to become a reality, with sensors on the box lid and an internet connection. Why charge a customer only once when you can charge them twice?
could be charged to me one at a time when they leave their container
Similar to a Costco card, or buying a phone to access apps in the app store.
Or the convenience of the cashier, so they can see you packed the right vegetables in the sack.
And probably they use plastics instead of paper because its cheaper, and they can scrape a penny off the price.
A lot of the power on what packaging is used is still in the consumer's hands, though. Just don't buy those cookies that are individually wrapped.
It wouldn't take long for Walmart to start demanding more simpler recyclable paper packaging over plastic if they took responsibility for the waste they generate for their packaging.
> Alvarado and Sanchez were arrested and charged with felony recycling fraud, attempted grand theft, filing a false or forged document, and conspiracy, officials said.
https://www.ajc.com/news/national/men-smuggle-000-empty-bott...
One method that looks quite promising in this regard is Magnetic Density Separation (MDS) under development at Technical University Delft:
https://materialdistrict.com/article/innovations-plastic-rec...
1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
I always find it interesting in developing countries to see tons and tons of stuff being reused, way more than in Developed countries. i.e. A 1 liter beer bottle in Ecuador is $0.75 for the beer, and $1 deposit on the glass. The bottles are cleaned and reused hundreds of times.
The policies are actively hostile to repairing and reusing old products, e.g. computers, printers.
Eventually when their standard of living improves, so will their consumption.
In any scenario, homo economicus will weigh the cost of reusing something, vs the convenience of using that mental space and time for something else which makes him/her happier.
If the convenience is high enough, people will switch to the other product.
This doesnt happen now, because costs are still prohibitive.
But do note, that in India they pioneered the single use plastic package for clothing detergents. So now where people sold a whole box of detergent, there are now thousands upon thousands of plastic detergent sachets.
I liked the idea, except there was a problem (IMHO) in how it was implemented, because there was no requirement to show the tax amount that was charged to the consumer on their receipt.
If your receipt would say e.g. 'Groceries $30.00, Plastic tax: $2.05' then a consumer would have a real incentive to lower the amount of tax by choosing better packaging with less plastic.
I have always thought that recycling is a scam. That it really only makes sense for things like glass and some metals. But everyone is caught up in the feel goodness and if you don't you're some kind of animal.
I say put everything in the landfill, we will one day harvest it and all that resource will be in one place!
Only metal (all metals). Recycled Glass is worthless, and is crushed and used as landfill cover.
[0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/Sweden-runs-out-...
These are the steps I’ve taken to reduce my impact on the planet: eating a plant-based diet, never traveling by plane and only rarely by car (I never learned to drive and the vast majority of my travel during the year is by bicycle, public transit or foot), never having kids, and living in a small apartment.
Does separating my glass and plastic jars really make that much of an additional difference?
You know when you travel by plane, you fly over most of the terrain you might have encountered if you took a bicycle? What's more detrimental now? Twain wrote,
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
But read his books, and you'll see how he traveled: slowly.
> a carbon offset for a round-trip cross-country commercial flight is about $10
You can't buy yourself out of your contribution to CO2 in the air. That $10 doesn't remove anything. It buys piece of mind, and the hope that things in the future may be better. For now, the world keeps warming. There's no capitalistic mechanism invented yet that's going to change that.
I agree that a carbon offset doesn't absolve you of responsibility, but like everything in life, it's tradeoffs.
What's so complicated about "tax people that produce CO2, pay people that capture CO2"?
That uses an offset price of $7/ton, which seems rather low. Otherwise, offsetting the world's emissions would be only about $200b a year (.2% of world economy)
https://www.myclimate.org/fileadmin/myc/files_myc_perf/12_fl...
SFO -> JFK direct round-trip in July for about 0.9 metric tons
The problem with a voluntary offsetting regime to calculate damage prices is that the clearing price is the marginal cost of abatement for a voluntarily requested amount of CO2 to be abated. As more CO2 is requested to be abated, the marginal costs go up (less low hanging fruit like planting trees).
Regardless, while you might feel good that you paid $10/ton to abate your flight, the reality is that if everyone else did this, you'd be paying a lot more than $10/ton.
A fun read: http://environment.yale.edu/kotchen/pubs/explain.pdf
(There's also controversy whether a project that produces X abatement credits really is abating that much carbon, but that's another story).
Our system today wouldn't function at all if everyone acted like you (I'm not saying it would be bad! We probably should have a totally different system that would work for far more people living your way).
The real issue with consumption and waste-disposal lies with the patterns in the economy that encourage the creation of disposable products in the first place.
All that said, recycling can still be positive if done right. ANd separating glass and plastic etc. would be trivial if the producers of goods were set up more to make it as easy as possible.
That said, one should always make an effort to recycle aluminum properly. There's a reason aluminum is often referred to as "solidified electricity" and it's because it takes enormous amounts of energy to extract aluminum from raw ore. Recycling finished aluminum goods cuts out that entire step of the production chain and has an enormous impact on large-scale energy consumption.
We separate paper, cardboard, glass (by color) [1], aluminium and plastics (PET). All of those are free to get rid of. Trash however is not and is charged at a high rate per bag.
Paper and cardboard go to several paper plants which re-use it to produce recycled paper items.[2]
PET is turned back into bottle and other items [3]
Aluminum is reused and saves more than 95% of the original energy required to produce it (as you said) [4]
2/3 of the glass collected is turned into new bottles. [5]
Trash is sent of to an incineration plant which produces electricity and heat [6].
[1] https://www.buelach.ch/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_2012_07Juli...
[3] https://www.petrecycling.ch
[4] http://www.swissrecycling.ch/wertstoffe/aluminium/
[5] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/ted/de/index/entsorgung_recycli...
[6] https://docplayer.org/docs-images/50/18262133/images/page_4....
Here near Seattle, it's mandated by law. Do laws require recycling in Switzerland? Each of the recycling facts may be true in small runs of sorted material. It is more difficult to make these true in large runs of unsorted material.
Tangent: Where are the AI that should sort these for us?
That is true of the European Union in general. However, I suspect that a lot of the old electronics thrown away find themselves to one of those African recycling dystopias where poor people just melt down circuit boards, inhaling toxic fumes all day long. I find it difficult to believe that some decade-old mobile phone or clock that I drop off at a shop’s collection point, actually goes to a high-tech, safe recycling center.
How do they ensure GDPR compliance? What about privacy?
Does having such strict controls on disposal make you think twice before buying something - have you ever thought "I like that, but how would I dispose of the packaging?"
On the downside, non-recyclable plastic is kind of at an advantage because it compacts really well. Also, burnable trash (which is basically paper and organic waste) is easy to dispose of because it is collected twice a week (hot countries need to do this). So a lot of my neighbours have mountains of cardboard and plastic bags (we're pretty careful anyway, so generally it's not too bad). It would be great if there was a compostable category that was collected often that didn't take cardboard. That way the cardboard could come once a month and I'm sure it would cut down on paper packaging.
Of course, this works well because we have no room for trash. In other parts of the world where people have garages as big as my entire apartment, I think it would have considerably less effect.
It's a seriously dumb process. Take a bottle, crush it, melt it down, and make new bottles. What was wrong with the old bottles?
They've almost completely disappeared from the market in favor of aluminum cans and 50cl PET bottles due to consumer preference (lighter weight, less fragile)
Washing the old bottles takes energy, water, and manpower. Making new ones uses less of all three of those, it's as simple as that.
http://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-recycling/
Aside from aluminium, there doesn't seem to be much of a point of recycling even though city governments keep doing it. (Even for stuff like aluminium cans, the rate of recycling has decreased, because the can design has improved and each can uses very little aluminium.)
And by charging a (relatively) large amount of money for getting rid of trash - like they do in Switzerland - is a great tool of both raising awareness with consumers, improving habits, and making recycling economically viable in the meantime.
Even aluminum.
If some aluminum company wants it bad enough -- and if it's worth enough -- they can go dig it up.
I dislike companies making profits on forced labor. Too many virtue-signaling municipalities mandate recycling (and sometimes even charges you for pickup) just so some recycling company can increase its bottom line. Nonsense. Bury everything. It's cheap.
The point of recycling aluminium is that is avoids the enormous energy expenditures and carbon of processing raw ore. So, recycling is a sensible step towards environmental protection. It might “make a company some money”, but your failing to do it still has environmental consequences. And if a company had to go “dig it up”, there would probably still be more carbon generated than if you just sorted your rubbish.
I.e. if recycling aluminium saves more resources than it cost in labor/effort, then it should be economically profitable to do so with the recycling company doing the sorting of that aluminium out of trash or even digging it up from the landfill instead of processing raw ore.
If recycling something is profitable only if subsidized by free sorting labor from the general population, then it seems like a signal that it's not actually worth it to spend that labor on it, if reusing that material is so worthless compared to the effort it takes to sort it; so (depending on local economics) it may be that it's good to recycle scrap metal and aluminium and worthless to recycle paper or some types of plastic.
You see, this isn't about virtue, or saving the planet, or any warm-fuzzy feelings.
It's amount metal.
It's my aluminum.
I bought it. I have already paid my portion of the "enormous energy expenditures". If you want MY aluminum sent to some reprocessing facility, cut me a check each month and I'll sell you MY aluminum.
All this talk of carbon and the environment... did you not read the article?! This is a multi-billion dollar business! This stuff is getting shipped all over the world. Until you -- or someone -- offers me hard cold cash for my aluminum, I'll do with it what I want.
Unless your country has a truly effective carbon-offset plan, then the price you paid for that aluminium likely does not take into account the environmental externalities of producing it. Furthermore, the pure energy costs of producing aluminium – environmental externalities aside – are actually state-subsidized in a few places, so what one pays may not entirely cover the production.
> This is a multi-billion dollar business! This stuff is getting shipped all over the world.
As I said, the market and legislation being what it is, it is entirely possible for companies to make money from recycling, while at the same time an individual’s decision not to aid that recycling has an environmental toll. It may indeed be desirable to enact laws that redirect some of those recycling profits back to consumers, but in the meantime, simply refusing outright to sort your rubbish is still a jerk thing to do.
Don't really have any other option where I live since there's just a couple of shared dumpsters for the apartment complex and the neighbors across the street would probably get upset if us apartment dwellers filled up their recycling bin on a regular basis.
Though, now that I'm thinking about it, my collection of years worth of fast food bags I have sitting in a cupboard might just end up in one of those bins next garbage day...
Is this how you handle all human interactions?
A lot of times municipal dumps are pushing recycling because it's cheaper than managing the material in the landfill for decades to come.
Hopeful news.. see: https://materialdistrict.com/article/innovations-plastic-rec...
My guess is recycling doesn't make much of an additional difference. There's a reason it's third in reduce-reuse-recycle. I separate out recyclables mostly out of habit (and garbage service bin for recycling is much larger than than one for garbage) but I wonder whether recycling could be a net negative due to moral exhaustion/fatigue/substitution -- surely there is research on this, and I would love pointers to it.
If you absolutely want to minimize your environmental impact to the extent that you think reproducing is pointless, isn’t the logical end result to immediately commit suicide as well?
http://www.atimes.com/article/mahathir-resets-the-terms-for-...
That's too bad, as the Chinese people are industrious and creative, and together we stand a better chance of making the best use of waste.