Recycling in America
economist.com
economist.com
Surprisingly this just isn't true. It takes a lot of work and chemicals to clean inks and glues out of paper for recycling.
Penn & Teller looked into this in an episode of Bullshit! a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4
Aluminum and clear glass are very efficient to recycle, plastics and colored glass depend on commodity prices, and paper is just a terrible idea to recycle. It's much better for the environment to farm trees for making paper, then put that paper in landfills and harvest the methane gas the paper emits when it decomposes.
isn't this the type of thing where a tax might be useful- for example, a tax on products that use 'new' plastic/glass as opposed to recycled? basically, convert the 'cost' of garbage everywhere into an actual cost?
Taxes are useful to capture externalities, where the costs imposed are on other people unrelated to the transaction. For example, taxing air pollution helps to capture the costs it imposes on the general population, which the manufacturer and their customer could otherwise ignore.
Quantifying that cost is a challenge--maybe start with how much $$ it would take to "un-product" the product and return it back to the raw materials it came from. In some cases, we'd find it probably costs more to un-make a product than it was sold for.
Could also (in addition to, or instead of) charge the MANUFACTURER for a portion of this shared environmental cost, as they ultimately chose to make a product designed to be turned into pollution.
I wouldn't want to put a tax on the manufacturers, because you'll end up discouraging reuse. You don't want somebody who comes up with a novel way of using old Coke bottles to pay the same as somebody who just pitches them.
Taxes are a cost of doing business. Tax breaks and incentives is unearned income.
Apparently from the discussion here, working with recycled material is more costly for corporations and therefore they
would not be compelled to give up profits to save the environment and improve sustainability.
So, it's now either the people's or the govt's duty to step in and try to mitigate the risk since the market dynamics are
not favorable to work on their own.
People or govt could help by subsidizing the cost of recycling the materials and making it more appealing for businesses to
use them in their manufacturing processes and therefore preserving the environment.
As to which is better raising taxes or giving tax breaks from the point of view of govt interference, I believe that
incentive is less invasive and more importantly less coercive than raising taxes and distorting the market and pushing the
increase in operating costs to the consumers instead.
Unfortunately it's also leading to local government approving incinerators for other types of rubbish
In California and some other US states, you can sell them, though this is in part due to a redemption fee charged when you buy them. Here's a price chart from this year (price per pound):
Aluminum Cans - $1.59 Glass Bottles - $0.104 #1 PETE Plastic Bottles - $1.16 #2 HDPE Plastic Bottles - $0.59 #3 PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) - $0.56 #4 LDPE Plastic Bottles -$2.03 #5 PP Plastic Bottles - $0.60 #6 PS Plastic Bottles - $5.69 #7 Others Plastic Bottles - $0.31 Bimetal - $0.35
This is profitable enough that crews of people come around to steal curbside recyclables in many California cities [1].
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Battle-brews-over-raiders...
Shouldn't it be able to be downcycled cheaply? Like shredded paper products for things like insulation and other filler?
It's a bad idea to make paper the way we do now in the first place. Pulping and bleaching is energy intensive and involves a bunch of not-so-friendly chemicals resulting in a bunch of pollutants.
Omitting the bleaching would help, or at least finding a different way to do it.
Energy consumption is an important thing to pay attention to, but the point of recycling is about not taking more stuff out of the ground.
...the only difference is that when the original tree rotted, it didn't leach chemicals into the soil from the inks, bleaches and other chemicals used in the production of the magazine.
So contaminants aside, composting paper instead of recycling it is actually better for the environment - assuming renewable tree harvesting practices are followed.
Of course, you can't actually put the contaminants aside nor assume that renewable harvesting practices are being used, so even this argument is flawed. At some point, the only way to affect the environment positively is to stop buying as many of the paper products as you can reasonably avoid buying.
There is no financial incentive to use recycled goods. They cost more than 'fresh' goods, they require additional processing, they add risk from material contamination (not biologic, structural and chemical). There are a dozen different reasons for this but much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the amazingly interlinked municipal waste management structure.
Here is a situation where you could hire anyone from students, to sex-offender ex-Cons, to the mentally impaired to work at a recycling plant pre-processing material for effective recycling, thus providing jobs for anyone willing to work. They get paid and perhaps feel good about helping the environment, and the supply of recycled material goes up and helps push the price down on the spot market.
Financially you are going to lose taxpayer money running those plants because it is cheaper to make this stuff fresh, but its perhaps a better investment than other assistance programs.
[1] http://www.sec.gov/news/headlines/wastemgmt6.htm
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/us/mayor-and-trash-hauling...
[3] "Landfill company sued over bribery case" http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/2014/08/29/14405720/
Are you suggesting forced labor camps even for mental patients and other disadvantaged groups in society?
Not all mentally impaired people; there is of course a spectrum.
There are humans involved in various stages, but it's technology that will lead to higher quality, lower price recycled goods particularly as machine sorting makes it easier for consumers to contribute their waste into the system.
Recycling is very regional. Some states don't have bottle deposits.
Where I live now, they gave up on the rules that nobody followed (plastic # types in particular) and have "single stream" where everything that might be recyclable goes to one plant and is sorted by machines/people.
I remember having to buy my bag in germany because I didn't have one. Ikea did the same thing here for a while (no bags), but they have plastic ones now.
http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/BevContainer/Recyclers/Director...
(I see California on all the returnables from my state (which requires stores accept any that they sell), so I wondered what you were talking about)
I like California's policy so much better cause I buy a lot of beer that gets rejected in the reverse vending machines.
The problem with the recycling centers is that you pretty much need a car to return them. With in-store machines you can just bring the bottles with you when you go grocery shopping.
I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct.
Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages recycling!
I also work for a brewery and it is sad that none will re-use bottles in the united states, all beer goes into brand new bottles :(
what.
Who's charging you? Local government?
It's funny, the waste management people in our town are still unionised out the wazoo, and they're in deep with the labor party so they keep going on strike to put pressure on the incumbent greens. It's really not a good advertisement for the labor movement.
We have no limits on what we put out for blue (recyclables) bin or green (organic) bin waste (collected weekly), and since we've switched to clear garbage bags, the only limit on non-recyclable garbage (collected bi-weekly) is that you have a limit of four non-transparent shopping bags within your bagged garbage.
We reached an 81% diversion (from landfill) rate in 2013.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/08/15/markham_shines_as...
With some regard, there are areas of the US that do this. The city i live in charges extra for more than 1 trash can and really limits what is picked up, while a neighboring city has tags that go on trash bags (charged by the bag). Then again, another neighboring city does neither and will pick up pretty much whatever you put on the curb. For a nationalized system there'd have to be consistent infrastructure and federal funding...and there's really no push for either. Rather, the current method is to incentivize the public to recycle on their own through bottle deposits (though most states don't do this) and/or education.
I was forced to pay people to take my recycling, which I never had any of because I take it to the recycling center and get around 35-40 cents a pound.
A similar thing happened to my parents, living in a Milwaukee suburb. They have a well drilled and use well water.
The city decided that this is a health hazard and is forcing everyone to be on well water. Not only do they tear up your yard to drop the pipes, you also have to pay a contractor to hook up the water main to your house. Non-compliance results in a fine. A FINE?! For using your own well water...
Many, many cities have policies just as you described - pay by usage.
Many cities have free recycling.
It is going to be different for every single city/town.
My garbage is picked up by a private company unfortunately. That means my landlord only pays them to pick up garbage, not recycling. The town picks up recycling for individual households for free but my complex has private dumpsters.
I know people who can only put their garbage out in special bags and they have to pay the company or city for the bags, so they pay per bag of garbage.
You can tell that metal is worth recycling because you have people driving around looking for metal scrap and taking it. No one takes plastic.
Cleaning, and sorting, plastic and paper takes more energy and water than using virgin.
Especially water, America does not have extra of, to spend on washing things.
It works in Europe because they make the consumers do all the sorting and washing, so recycling companies don't notice the extra expense. In particular the water, but also the use of time.
That has its own expense - you need like 10 different bins, and the consumers have to transport the garbage to the neighborhood recycling hall. That's fine if you are in a small dense city, not so simple in the US.
If you wanted to re-capture the energy in paper and plastic burn them for energy. Ignore glass, the crust of the planet is made of glass, there is absolutely no reason to recycle it.
1. Reduce
I visited friends outside LA last year and was downright dumbfounded by the size of the two trash cans at their house. Both were 50% bigger than the one I get here in Canada for curbside trash. Talk about consumption.
2. Reuse
Living in Latin America it was awesome to see the deposit on a bottle was more than the liquid in the bottle. It was unheard of to throw out or recycle bottles.
3. Recycle
Bottom of the list!
An interesting tidbit is that recycling [reuse] rates has increased such that there isn't enough trash to burn (and burning is still much better than landfills). So Sweden now import trash from neighbouring countries.
Two light-weight articles:
- http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/sweden-imports-tras...
More in-depth, from the organization running Swedens recycling:
- http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_en...
This is also heavily influenced by oil prices - if oil is cheaper then plastics made from it are cheaper but the collection / cleaning / processing costs for recycled materials aren't nearly as volatile. I'm pretty sure recycled metals don't have the same issues.
The cost of recyclables is so closely correlated to variable costs (like energy prices) that efforts to mandate or close loop recycling always fail over a long enough timeframe.
Also I suspect Walmart has no idea the extent to which recyclables are used in their products since about 70% of Walmart's products are produced in China, and China consumes the majority of US (and European) recyclables.
Want to increase recycling rates? Ban the use of alternative fuels and watch recyclable recovery rates skyrocket. This is an instance where the free market knows better than policy makers.
You'd be 100% wrong. Walmart investigates the crap out of most if not all of their supply chain.
I have to pay extra for recycling in my town. However, if there wasn't a bottle bill, it would likely be free, as the recycling companies would gladly take all recyclables in exchange for the aluminum cans.