A-HA! Of course it’s Trump’s Fault, what with his stellar economy and more money in our pockets! When we were all broke, jobless and depressed under Comrade 0bama - Life Was Good!
*SNORT*
“The best way to fix recycling is probably persuading people to buy less stuff, which would also have the benefit of reducing some of the upstream waste created when products are made. But that’s a hard sell in the United States, where consumer spending accounts for 68 percent of the GDP. The strong economy means more people have more spending money, too, and often the things they buy, such as new phones, and the places they shop, such as Amazon, are designed to sell them even more things. The average American spent 7 percent more on food and 8 percent more on personal-care products and services in 2017 than in 2016, according to government data.”
I wish
“Scrap” Aluminium [and Copper based Alloys] is still valuable.
Catalytic Converters and Stainless Steel are still winners too.
I can remember doing paper drives as a kid. I haven’t seen any of those in a while.
Our recycle centers no longer recycle glass. GLASS!! Asked why, the guys who work there (yes, just guys...) had no idea why...
Back when there were deposits on returnable bottles, there was a cottage industry of kids with wagons seeking them out to earn spending money. Of course those bottles were stouter made and worthy of reuse. Now the idea is to take used products and and turn them into new material in order to make something else out of it.
Need to make it easier to open a landfill, its ridiculous to be trucking garbage halfway across the state.
Smarter packaging would help.
The Emperor is wearing no clothes!
Alsostop with all the disposable everything, from dishclothes to toilet cleaning wands.
My Town:
100 a year for the Blue Bin(recycle)
Only take Aluminum and glass bottles,newspapers card board.
No styro,paper coffee cups or plates, batteries, nope.
Only premo items WMI can sell
Its a rip off, period as they dont take everything
Boxes all over the place??? It’s crazy....Time to put a chute in the walls instead.
In CA there used to be recycling stations everywhere where they would redeem the 5 cents per can the state charges on your beer and soda.
The state would reimburse them the 5 cents and they’d sell the aluminum and glass at market rate. Since everyone was bring the commodity to them, it was profitable business.
There are none left. All out of business.
There will be an initiative to stop the 5 cents per can/bottle recycling fee. And since only about 1/2 was being recycled under these favorable conditions, the state used to derive 10s of millions in revenue from it every year.
“For decades, we’ve been throwing just about whatever we wanted — wire hangers and pizza boxes and ketchup bottles and yogurt containers — into the bin and sending it to China, where low-paid workers sorted through it and cleaned it up.”
I know the left believes this CRAP, but, as others have said, it just gets dumped in the ocean, particularly the plastics, which is why there is the absolutely huge plastic garbage pile floating in the Pacific. I think even China got sick of that mess and won’t let us keep contributing to it (even if indirectly, by having the Chinese do the dumping). I’m thinking it was starting to interfere with the operations of their navy vessels.
A classic. Nincompoop liberals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcdNaajKExs
I suspect that the left will reach a compromise - have people keep sorting their trash and THINKING they’re recycling (as if they were in the past, LOL), while dumping it all in a landfill.
That way, the activists still are able to virtue signal, while the cities keep their costs down.
Some of those ships taking recycling materials to China dumped them in the Pacific instead.
At the ranch we do our part to fight the nemesis of plastic. Plastic bottles, straws, wrapping, containers etc. We convert those (and many other products) to smoke and ash. Never to be insightful or bothersome again.
In my city, the libs went apesh!t when they found out plastics that were turned in for recycling were just going to the landfill. They’ll never learn the folly of trusting the government.
What a joke. You could take all the trash generated in the US for 100 years
and it would take up a 25 x 10 mile area 400 feet deep. We are NOT running out of landfill. It’s a big country....
“If you keep filling up this landfill for 100 years, and if you assume that during this time the populations of the United States doubles, then the landfill will cover about 160,000 acres, or 250 or so square miles, with trash 400 feet deep.
Here’s another way to think about it. The Great Pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet at the base and is 481 feet tall, and anyone who has seen it in real life knows that it’s a huge thing — one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.”
The technology exists to turn plastics, rubber, organics, etc into petroleum, which can then be refined into things like kerosene and gasoline. It needs to improve a lot more before it’s efficient enough to be cost-effective, but it’s a start.
For that matter, most plastics can be turned into crude oil using a setup not too different from a moonshine still. I have some ideas for making that more cost-effective, but it probably wouldn’t scale very well.
At any rate, the conversion process is about at the “punch-card computer” stage. It’ll be a while before it competes with other processes. But when it reaches that stage, landfill owners will be sitting on gold mines.
all metals, particularly non-ferrous metals, will always be worth recycling due to the high energy costs of smelting virgin metals and/or the the rarity of the ore itself ...