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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

I assure you that anything metal gets recycled. It's much cheaper to recycle than dig more ore out of the ground.

tosses brake rotors in city recycling pickup bucket

In my neighborhood, you can leave metal objects on the curb and they're gone within hours, loaded into a pickup or trailer and taken to the scrap metal recyclers for cash. That came in handy when I was doing rental property maintenance, but unfortunately used mattresses have 0 scrap value.

Mattresses and couches are a mix of fabric, wood and metal. Most places don't accept them unless you strip them down, which is a PITA (which is precisely why they don't take them).

I assume there's a lot of things cheaper to recycle than to create new, but the problem is how to extract/separate it out of an overwhelming stream of unrelated materials, is it not?

Person from Germany here where we have 4 different bins per household - paper, recyclables (metal, plastic), compostables and dump (+ glass by color, batteries and electronics at dedicated sites). We get to a recycling rate of about 20-30% (effective at plant) with really wanting to and having it ingrained into our culture.

Recycling is hard at the best of times. Unless packaging gets much better at identifying as recyclable it will be a long road ahead (it's the small things, black plastic is hard to identify and get's burned, composite plastics are problematic, like different plastic foil over plastic canister). At least people think about it around here, but it is a very hard problem.

Consider also: recycled black plastic is often made from electronic waste, which isn't done very carefully, and so black plastic often has heavy metals from computer components. Problem is, this recycled black plastic is often used for food containers.

What could possibly go wrong?

Damn, I had no clue that it was just 20-30%. That's depressing.

German 66.1 percent recycling rate in 2015. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=...

Germany used to export 69% of collected plastic to China too, so they will likely face a similar crisis as America. https://qz.com/1310240/chinas-ban-on-plastic-recycling-impor...

  tosses brake rotors in city recycling pickup bucket

No core charge or other incentive from the parts store?

Not on brake rotors, no[1]. They are always from new - there's nothing to recondition on them, they're only suitable for melting down again. I'd think they would be prohibitively expensive to handle for the retail chain, given their low scrap value.

[1] Aside from top-end stuff that has a separate bell and rotor, but this is maybe 0.001%, if that.

Have you ever been to Australia where iron ore is less than 1 meter below ground?

Australia is rich in many minerals. Nonetheless, I'm willing to bet that people sending the metal to a truck to bring to a foundry is still cheaper than mining with all of its environmental impacts. Also, this: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/metal-recycling-where-australia-...

Is that really true?

Accurate to within an order of magnitude. The Pilbara has a number of mines that are perhaps more accurately described as ditches. Source: Mining Engineer, been to the Pilbara.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel-iron_deposits#Economic... - the 'little or no need for drilling and blasting' suggests <20m deep to me. There certainly is iron on the surface, the Pilbara Banded Iron formations can be something like 300m thick or something silly - I'd be surprised if it didn't outcrop. The issue is more which parts are most economic to mine, which is a question of depth vs grade.

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