Bikes, bowling balls, and the balancing act that is modern recycling (2015)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Of particular interest was the bit on plastic bags (edit: which are largely considered “contamination” in the USA) - the worker complained that they put them into a dedicated stream to bale and sell, “but no one is buying them”.
Economics wrote the truth on the wall for these “recyclable” materials back in 2015 (or before). The world is just now catching up to the reality that reducing is the only real way to improve the situation we’re in - recycling should be a last resort.
Not everything collected through recycling must be "recycled" in the traditional sense. It should be called "landfill diversion", not recycling.
Is it incompatible? The article makes it sounds like a clear win for the city, and a sometimes-win for the plant:
All of this may mean that at any given moment, recycling can be anything from highly profitable to a struggle to cover costs. If we were to shut these facilities down during periods where they weren't profitable, however, we'd be wasting infrastructure and expertise we'd want when costs shift in the other direction.
The city does pay a tipping fee to get rid of the materials, but it's less than what it would pay to landfill them—plus it avoids the cost of transporting everything to the landfill.
The city even has a chance to get some of its tipping fee back. When recycled materials are sufficiently valuable, Sims shares a percentage of the profits back with the government. During periods where these materials are priced low, the company gets to keep any profits it can eke out.
The net result is that the city can benefit when recycled materials are valuable. And when raw material prices are low, it's still profitable to keep the facility operating.
But it requires ceramics that are resistant to heat, pressure, and chemical erosion, which turns out to be the usual 'pick two' situation.
I had heard someone was working on composite ceramics to deal with this (heat and pressure resistant bulk, enameled with heat and chemical resistant coatings) but have heard nothing since.
So far they only seem to be price competitive in hazardous waste situations.
Most people think recycling is as good as never having consumed in the first place.
In the meantime, recycling technology is still in relative infancy, so while it may not make business sense now, it may be essential in the future for the recovery of certain materials. And, like solar before it, the only way to get it to a useful enough efficiency for that future use is to suffer through adopting it while it's inefficient.
I believe Danon yogurt made a similar decision when they went to thinner plastic on their single serving cups.
I think Method has since figured out a recyclable solution so their refill bags are recyclable but still made of next to nothing.
1.) Ocean City, MD opts to burn recyclables in Covanta Incinerators (selfish, awesome): https://www.oceancity.com/ocean-city-has-no-plans-to-return-...
2.) Covanta Incinerators are bad despite what the company claims (selfish, shocking): https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/too-much-pollution/
I wonder if it would make sense to instead have dedicated areas in landfills where you put products that can't be reasonably recycled today in the hopes that in the future someone figures out a way to do it and can just tap into the neatly separated pile to get their raw materials? This is pretty speculative and optimistic. Plus it requires dump site operators to correctly guess which kind of materials are going to be useful in the future.
So basically what 3rd World countries do with the U.S. electronics.
We have those; they're called landfills.
> neatly separated pile[s]
The problem is that most types of refuse are already semi-uniformly mixed at the household level, so you would have spend labor separating them, which might not be needed[0], so you might as well put off separation until know you need it.
0: Eg, if the most efficient way of recycling them turns out to be: dump the whole mess into vat of genetically engineered bacteria, and sift out the glass and metal bits when they build up.
A colleague recently told me that re-usable coffee cups are about single-use plastics. I looked down at my coffee cup and found it to be both recyclable and biodegradable. He told me it was about the lids. The lid was the same.
Without further research, I would be a bit unsure about the cost of making a re-usable cup vs its lifetime vs biodegradable single-use cups. But despite the fact that things have already improved, I'm hearing they will be banned...
https://resource.co/article/veolia-recycle-120m-coffee-cups-...
> However, two reprocessors have announced this year that they have the capability to recycle coffee cup waste. In March, packaging company DS Smith stated that it could recycle all the UK’s coffee cups at its paper mill in Kemsley, Kent, while on a smaller scale, paper manufacturer James Cropper launched its own trademarked ‘CupCycling’ process in May
> Costa announced its aim to recycle as many coffee cups as it sells by 2020, equating to 500 million cups. The programme involves the chain subsidising a number of waste collection companies, including Veolia, to collect takeaway cups from stores (£70 per tonne collected). This subsidy aims to raise the value of coffee cups as a material in the eyes of recyclers, making it more financially viable to collect them.