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.
Conventional wisdom -- as well as Wikipedia and pretty much all other references I found -- says that recycling paper is better for the environment, because it uses fewer resources (energy, water), among other things. I'm not ruling out that conventional wisdom et al. are incorrect, but I think I'd prefer something other than a TV show.
I would believe it. If the problem really is a supply/demand imbalance, the market should correct it. But nobody will pay me for my used plastic bottles.
This is one of the reasons we have seperate collection bags for recyclable materials in the UK for households. We don't have the benefit of landfill space, and it's economically more efficient to seperate paper, glass, metals and other potentially recyclable materials at source, than at a post process stage. The resident has two bins side by side, and sorts at source.
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.
This is the money quote: Coca-Cola committed to using at least 25% recycled plastic in its containers by 2015, but revised this downwards owing to scarce supply and high costs.
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.
Most of the sorting of recycling these days is done by an array of very clever machines, that use e.g. computer vision and blasts of air, or various physical properties to separate out materials.
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.
Although one could say these companies are externalizing the true costs (on society) of their products; they still are the ones creating this packaging.
Will never forget how I (German) walked into a Safeway in San Francisco with my bag full of bottles and asked the cashier where the deposit-machine is. She had absolutely no clue what I was talking about.
New York has those bottle in/ cash out machines. If you have a bottle that the store doesn't sell it would reject it.
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.
If you were actually at the safeway in sf then the answer is that the bottle machine is in the parking lot. The one with the big queue of hobos and crazy people.
East Coast has reverse vending machines (bottle deposit machines) to put the bottles in. It reads the barcode - at least all places I've even lived in the East have them. When I was in California visiting family we had to go to a recycling center to get them weighed. The policies are regional.
I like California's policy so much better cause I buy a lot of beer that gets rejected in the reverse vending machines.
Just about every grocery store in Oregon has those machines. I guess it depends highly state to state. When I was working for a summer in New Mexico, I was somewhat appalled how the waitresses at restaurants would collect beer bottles from tables and toss them into the trash.
America is way behind from living overseas for 3 years.
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 :(
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.
Yep. This happened in St. Louis county a few years ago. They gave all contracts to one company "to reduce costs" and made the payment mandatory for recycling whether you used it or not.
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.
> 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!
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.
Beyond having to pay extra, no rental property I've ever lived in has had any recycling services (I'm in the Midwest), not even a community recycling bin next to the garbage. You've often got to put in a ton of effort to recycle, and it's not hard to understand people giving up.
America doesn't recycle more because it just isn't worth it to recycle things (except for metal). (And if you notice, this article, like most of them, talks about how it's worth it to recycling aluminum, and doesn't mention anything else.)
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.
Of course everyone should remember Recycling is the last thing you should be doing.
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.
Sweden is a pretty interesting case. Only 1-2% of trash ends up in landfills. Much is recycled [reused], and the rest is burned for energy (heating and electricity).
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.
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.
> 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
You'd be 100% wrong. Walmart investigates the crap out of most if not all of their supply chain.
The container deposit laws pervert the recycling process by taking the only things worth recycling (aluminum cans) out of the single recycle stream.
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.
On a side note, I am consistently reminded of the extraordinary skill level the staff of The Economist employs when writing photo captions and article headlines.
[+] [-] jobu|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] morsch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ams6110|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregsq|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuapants|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pixl97|11 years ago|reply
Shouldn't it be able to be downcycled cheaply? Like shredded paper products for things like insulation and other filler?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] platz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matdrewin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steamy|11 years ago|reply
Are you suggesting forced labor camps even for mental patients and other disadvantaged groups in society?
[+] [-] philfrasty|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|11 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] hn_|11 years ago|reply
I like California's policy so much better cause I buy a lot of beer that gets rejected in the reverse vending machines.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tmoullet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurencerowe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Errorcod3|11 years ago|reply
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 :(
[+] [-] hn_|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jgoewert|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] therobot24|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robwilliams|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|11 years ago|reply
what.
Who's charging you? Local government?
[+] [-] ars|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] youngtaff|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|11 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] sandstrom|11 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] fencepost|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rrggrr|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cleverjake|11 years ago|reply
You'd be 100% wrong. Walmart investigates the crap out of most if not all of their supply chain.
[+] [-] FredDollen|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matdrewin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lfowles|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianmcgowan|11 years ago|reply