Why aren't we recycling more?

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The products are not designed to be recycled. Our economic system is not designed for it, that's why we don't do it more.
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If we need more resources, we simply go where these resources are and "bring democracy and freedom" to these countries.
 
I recycle everything in order to benefit the environment, not for the fractional pennies that some municipalities pay. I get personal satisfaction that way.
 
Originally Posted by supton
Interesting about aluminum. Few months ago I got curious about the can vs bottle argument, as I do like beer on occasion, and it seemed that the various green articles I came across indicated a tie. I wasn't so sure about it, but I couldn't argue either way. I thought melting glass took a lot more energy than melting aluminum, plus the extra shipping weight; but all the articles talked about the energy cost of making virgin aluminum. What I didn't know was that they coat the inside of aluminum cans with plastic, just a thin layer, to prevent interaction.

Our county doesn't recycle glass. So that angle is off the table.

Cans are the superior vessel for beer. Oxygen and light are beer killers. Bottles are also significantly heavier and more bulky than cans.
 
Originally Posted by opus1
A couple of years later, the city added a fee for recycling to our water bills.

You and a number of people have mentioned being charged for recycling. You'd think these cities, counties, etc would be a bit smarter than that ! You expect residents to separate their trash from recyclable goods and then want to charge people to do this ? At least hide the increase in the regular "trash" charge !! The way the city explained it to us when they wanted people to recycle more was that they pay for trash disposal (at the landfills) based on weight or volume so the less trash, i.e. more recycling, residents have, the lower the city's charges from the landfills would be. In fact, for about 2 years, each month the city would give $100 to a randomly selected resident if they recycled (the trash bins actually had RFID tags and the trucks had scanners). This money actually came from Waste Management.

Here's their spiel about recycling vs trash:
Quote
Recycling saves more than just the environment-it saves the community lots of money, too. It costs the city $38.25 for every ton of garbage sent to a landfill. However, there is no cost for disposal of recyclables. As the community recycles more, the city further reduces its landfill costs and helps taxpayers save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year! All it takes is more participation by people like you!
 
I reuse as much as i can and rinse my recycle, but this is what my municipal told me recently after the Chinese recycle import ban:

1) Many plastics are not good enough to find a buyer: black plastic, clam shell (wrong melting point), dirty stuff (food container), mixed container (plastic coating with paper, etc), etc. They are called dirty dozen here.
2) You can only add up to 25% of recycle plastic without causing structural problem.
3) Cheap oil -> not cost effective to use recycled plastic after the contamination and quality concern

Metal cans are still recycled, and so are clean paper with little to no plastic coatings.

As to why not just landfill and then mine them when we ran out of oil? Because they degrade enough in landfill that makes them just junk, and it cost energy to dig them up, and running out of landfill is a problem they want to solve by recycle.

If they can burn plastic with no pollution, I'd gladly see that. The problem is burning plastic is also not that great of an idea due to pollution. I hope that commercially composeable bio plastic would be the future, it is easier to compose them than to recycle.

The new fad in our area is food scrap collection. This free up some room in the trash for the not recyclable (black plastic, clam shell, egg carton, foam, etc) in the trash.
 
Originally Posted by andyd
If Aluminum is cheaper refined from bauxite. Why is bauxite mined in Jamaica shipped to Iceland to be refined? Iceland has excess juice from geo thermal production. Where are used AL cans recycled?


refining takes a lot of energy to remove the oxygen from the oxide, recycle in theory doesn't. So the energy used are different.

Those excess electricity in Iceland are now more valuable for bit coin mining and data centers. You have to go to China to get alum refined because they subsidized their own heavy industries to compete with Alcan (monopoly).
 
Originally Posted by PandaBear
I reuse as much as i can and rinse my recycle,

3) Cheap oil -> not cost effective to use recycled plastic after the contamination and quality concern

If they can burn plastic with no pollution, I'd gladly see that. The problem is burning plastic is also not that great of an idea due to pollution.


Why burn plastic when you can reform it into gasoline and diesel fuel without pollution for about $0.36 a gallon?

The process is so simple you can do it at home
 
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Originally Posted by Rmay635703
Why burn plastic when you can reform it into gasoline and diesel fuel without pollution for about $0.36 a gallon?

The process is so simple you can do it at home


I consider that the same as "burning", making energy substitute out of it instead of trying to convert it into another plastic.

My main concern is still the same, the amount of effort to make the product clean enough, burning in general probably has less of a requirement than making it food grade again.
 
Reforming plastic is the cleanest possible way of dealing with it, only emissions are a small amount of co2 and methane which are easily dealt with.

Recycling plastics is actually quite dirty, with lots of exotic emissions and regulations to deal with thehazardous materials required
not as dirty as making it from crude but not far off either.
 
Originally Posted by PandaBear
If they can burn plastic with no pollution, I'd gladly see that. The problem is burning plastic is also not that great of an idea due to pollution. I hope that commercially composeable bio plastic would be the future, it is easier to compose them than to recycle..


What is the pollution issue that you associate with burning plastic ?

waste to energy plants globally have limits on chloride concentration (dioxins), and various dry and wet scrubbers to remove other nasties, and filter backs to collect the ash, so they are very clean...smack bang in the middle of cities in Europe, no smells or toxic fumes.

Composting creates methane...which is far more of a pollutant than the CO2 of the W2E plant.

It makes simple sense that oil be diverted to plastic, then burned, either in W2E, or converted to liquid fuels.
 
Originally Posted by y_p_w
Originally Posted by PimTac
Originally Posted by Kestas
As far as recycling of plastic, I'm curious what is done with the plastic. Where is the market for recycled plastic? I hear smatterings of it being used in plastic lumber and automotive interiors, but that doesn't nearly cover the amount of plastic collected.

When it comes to recycling, we not only have to address collecting material, but we also need to find uses for the material. Metals have been easily recycled for around 100 years. I've heard stories that some places simply have a well-sorted landfill.

Polypropylene underwear and other clothing.

That's traditionally where lots of clear PET went since recycled wasn't always considered food grade. Seriously, a lot of goes into making polyester fleece fabrics. However, a lot more is going back into food grade PET.

Polypropylene is actually quite recyclable. I'm not sure what's done with "other" unspecified plastics. From what I've heard, polystyrene isn't one of the harder plastics to recycle.


PET and polyethylene (HDPE-milk jugs) are frequently recycled-and there is ALWAYS a market for metals. I've seen that PET is sometimes used to make sneakers and boot soles...HDPE sometimes is made into water pipe.
 
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Originally Posted by billt460
Originally Posted by Bud
Originally Posted by Mr Nice
Not worth the hassles.


This

Same here. It's just the wife and I. We don't recycle because we have little to nothing to recycle. It's not worth the effort. We don't drink soda or alcohol, so that eliminates most anything in an Aluminum can or 2 liter plastic bottle. And we buy minimal junk. Nothing left. For the last 22 years we've been here, I use my blue recycle bin to store my pool chemicals in. Works great.


You're lucky-in many places, they WILL NOT TAKE trash without a recycling bin at the curb.
 
Originally Posted by andyd
If Aluminum is cheaper refined from bauxite. Why is bauxite mined in Jamaica shipped to Iceland to be refined? Iceland has excess juice from geo thermal production. Where are used AL cans recycled?


Tennessee. My employer shipped out 39 tons of them (two semi trailers) this morning.
 
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We were recently told that on the last re-compete for recycling, the prices went way up. I want to say from $5 to $50/ton?

The discussion was that there is no market for certain plastic types (#5, and a few others IIRC), and so only #1 and #2 plastics should be recycled.

If you have too much undesirable stuff (i.e. the wrong plastics, too much greasy paper in with good paper, etc), they will reject the recycling load to the landfill... At additional cost.
 
Originally Posted by JHZR2
We were recently told that on the last re-compete for recycling, the prices went way up. I want to say from $5 to $50/ton?

The discussion was that there is no market for certain plastic types (#5, and a few others IIRC), and so only #1 and #2 plastics should be recycled.

If you have too much undesirable stuff (i.e. the wrong plastics, too much greasy paper in with good paper, etc), they will reject the recycling load to the landfill... At additional cost.

I thought that China basically banned the importation of plastics for recycling. A lot of mixed, unsorted recycling used to go there for processing.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com...cling-ban-solutions-science-environment/

I believe they were taking the bulk of this because they have access to the cheaper manual labor to sort through it, but it also creates certain unrecylable streams because the amount of materials that shouldn't have been mixed in.
 
Originally Posted by hallstevenson
Originally Posted by opus1
A couple of years later, the city added a fee for recycling to our water bills.

You and a number of people have mentioned being charged for recycling. You'd think these cities, counties, etc would be a bit smarter than that ! You expect residents to separate their trash from recyclable goods and then want to charge people to do this ? At least hide the increase in the regular "trash" charge !! The way the city explained it to us when they wanted people to recycle more was that they pay for trash disposal (at the landfills) based on weight or volume so the less trash, i.e. more recycling, residents have, the lower the city's charges from the landfills would be
[/quote]

Yep - raise the regular rates to hide the costs.

I like the $100 giveaway idea - - then publicize it HEAVILY!!!
 
Originally Posted by hatt
Originally Posted by supton
Interesting about aluminum. Few months ago I got curious about the can vs bottle argument, as I do like beer on occasion, and it seemed that the various green articles I came across indicated a tie. I wasn't so sure about it, but I couldn't argue either way. I thought melting glass took a lot more energy than melting aluminum, plus the extra shipping weight; but all the articles talked about the energy cost of making virgin aluminum. What I didn't know was that they coat the inside of aluminum cans with plastic, just a thin layer, to prevent interaction.

Our county doesn't recycle glass. So that angle is off the table.

Cans are the superior vessel for beer. Oxygen and light are beer killers. Bottles are also significantly heavier and more bulky than cans.

Eh, we drink more wine than beer. The good stuff comes in glass bottles, the box stuff has a ways to go.

Originally Posted by Shannow
https://www.aluminum.org/aluminum-can-advantage

Quick glance shows what I thought was true, but I'm not sure how unbiased "The Aluminum Association" is. Good link though, thanks.
 
One thing that really irks me is the consumer gets blamed for poor recycling rates. I heard a glib guy on TV saying "single stream recycling" was SO much better accepted.

The reality is, when it all goes into the dump as "clean top fill", there's no need to pretend to sort anything anymore.
 
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