Posted on 02/17/2024 2:47:17 PM PST by nickcarraway
I miss Rush.
Mark Steyn just reissued his review of the loss of Rush:
https://www.steynonline.com/14100/rush-three-years-on
Here in the Charleston SC area we had plastic recycling for years. Turns out it had to be trucked up to North Carolina at a huge loss. So for years people here thought that they were doing something for the environment by recycling plastic when all of their efforts ended up with large mountains of plastic at the local landfills that was never leaving. I’m not sure if any plastic from here ever went to North Carolina.
“No hate for Plastics here.”
[Maybe we could sell virtue signaling lawn signs for fun and profit?]
Yep. I remember when recycling got big back in 1970 or so! Then someone noticed that all the separated products, paper, plastic colored and plain glass were still loaded on the same garbage truck, hauled to the dump, dumped together and covered with dirt.
Oil and plastics are not the ones pressuring recycling. It was the government pushing a green agenda. This reporter is not only ignorant but is stupid as well.
I read in the MSM, Newsday to be exact, decades ago that recycling was a bust. Of course they didn’t beat that drum all day but they hit it once.
And make them out of plastic
Aluminum, iron, lead, titanium and other metals can be recycled easily.
Plastic would be better repurposed cut into strips as a strengthen agent, or aggregate in concrete or asphalt.
Recycling paper and uses as much or energy as making the product new.
I worked at a landfill that pushed all the usual recycling pap. There were two major recycling companies near us that would bring in their non-recylables as trash. We noticed one of them had a lot more “trash” than usual. When asked about it they said all those loads were “contaminated”. We inspected those loads and found they were NOT contaminated. They just couldn’t process all the material they were getting.
The other company ended up storing their “excess” cardboard on our unused land until the market improved. It was about 25 feet high and as big as a football field. They covered it with tarps, and it sat there about two years. It took that long for a recycling market to become viable.
**I think Fe recycling is still working after all these years.**
Recycling of iron was used in Arkansas for years! A car wreck that is “totaled” anywhere in the US was taken to scrap yards in Missouri to be scrapped. There they might reuse 4 or 5 wrecked cars into one drivable Frankenstein car and slip it down into Arkansas where it would be sold through the auto auctions as an “abandoned auto”. Then for a few dollars you could get a clean Arkansas title showing it had never been wrecked.
The company I worked for decided the plant manager needed a brand new car so bought one right off the show room floor. Several months later I noticed a very slight difference in the color of the paint job, between front and back. An inspection showed it to have been in a wreck that had been bondoed and sold as new.
We always wondered why we could never get a good used car in Arkansas. We lived her thirty years before a working companion told me about this scam.
This is just plain not true.
Steel is recycled all the time.
Every jeweler in the world recycles gold and silver as well as any other precious metal.
Motor oil is recycled all the time. Even used deep fat frier oil is recycled into biodiesel.
Some paper and cardboard can be successfully recycled.
The problem with plastic recycling is that different plastics do not mix. BUT most shops that manufacture plastic items take every ounce of clean scrap or defective parts, regrind them and mix with virgin material. Recycling at work.
There is an entire cottage industry that has sprung up over stealing catalytic converters and sellng them to have the precious metal catalysts recycled.
The common feature of all successful recycling is an economic incentive to do it. The material is worth more than the cost of reprocessing. This is just not the case with post-consumer plastic items.
Somebody made money off of the scam.
And aluminum is only worth it in bulk quantities, not your curbside. I refuse to comply with any recycling program because they are stupid.
Around here, they’ve dropped curbside glass recycling because it isn’t worth doing. Most of what we’re doing with recycling is assuaging the feelings of Gaia-worshippers. At considerable cost, and perhaps even costing more energy than not recycling.
Everyone with a brain knew it was a non-starter right from the start. Trying to beat money out of these companies now is just a shake-down.
I use Mother Earth as my recycler. I roll everything down in the same bin and into the landfill.
When I was young and energetic I saved flattened aluminumm. I had enough to fill the back of my small pickup with boxes & bags. 142 lbs/$74
Looks like lawsuits are coming.
“ The best way to reduce plastic pollution is to avoid single-use plastics entirely. However, it is still better to recycle plastic at home than throw it away.”
That is true. Even better, reduce plastic pollution by banning all plastics.
Only to see a surge in energy usage, pollution, and raw material consumption used in manufacturing plastics substitutes that far exceeds the aforementioned factors for plastics.
The energy and resources (eg water) used to recycle a milk jug far exceeds the value of the reclaimed plastic. Ditto for most items.
Extracting hydrocarbons from the ground and turning them into products is amazingly efficient and yields comparatively small amounts of pollution compare to most so called natural alternatives. Except the ones that involve depopulating the earth. Which is of the course the deep green agenda.
-eye roll- I should have specified: “Neigborhood curbside recycling (glass, plastic, paper, aluminum).” They didn’t touch on industrial.
I know metals can be recycled. That’s why aluminum was the only one that wasn’t considered wasteful at the end of the episode.
I heard that in the end, Maryland just dumps all the carefully recycled stuff we put in our blue trash cans in with the other trash. But they sure as heck fine you if YOU do that.
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