Dang. Guess i'm a little late ...
Local governments ran a great scam, they cut back trash pickup to only once a week (while not reducing your taxes) and then forced you to recycle so they could sell your material to make even more money off your labor.
If it really was about the environment, people would not get fined for "stealing" someone else's recyclables. That was the sign there was something else going on.
Schadenfreude on the recycling nazis.
I approve of recycling as a concept, but it has to be economically viable.
There are problems in the original materials industry, too. A friend who buys steel from US Steel in Cleveland told me yesterday that US will try to honor orders submitted this year, but does not intend to fill orders placed in January. Sounds like demand is so low that it’s not economical to run the mill at all.
Hard to care about an extra few lbs of carbon emissions when you're trying to stay warm. Or figuring out a way to feed your family.
“Schadenfreude on the recycling nazis”
What schadenfeude? The free market solution just fell apart. Guess what? People still need that damn garbage collected.
Now, instead of making money of it, it’s a pure expense, a 100 % outflow from the tax purse.
Freepers have lost their damn minds.
blue trash can ping
Previously posted at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2144756/posts .
Hey, what a break for Obambi !! He can hire a boat-load of people to sort out the recyclables and thereby put a down payment on his “I’m gonna create 2 million jobs” promise!
LOL
BPE
The situation has also been rough on junk poachers — people who made a profitable trade of picking off cardboard and other refuse from bins before the recycling trucks could get to it. Those poachers have shut their operations, said Michael Sangiacomo, chief executive of Norcal Waste Systems, a recycling and garbage company that serves Northern California. “I knew it was really bad a few weeks ago when our guys showed up and the corrugated cardboard was still there,” he said. “People started calling, saying ‘You didn’t pick up our cardboard,’ and I said, ‘We haven’t picked up your cardboard for years.’ ”
Yellow brass was at $2/lb. It is now at $0.48/lb.
It was also a profit center for the garbage company. I pick up your garbage for say $10.00 per month. I pick up your garbage AND your recyclables for say $15.00. Then all the stuff goes to the land fill anyway.
Waste not want not used to be our grandparents motto. You’d think recycling material would be cheaper than having to make new material.
on the up side, the cost of ammo should start going down again.
What? Recycling is in trouble because it’s not profitable? I thought profit was a nasty capitalistic concept. What about the earth? All those “non profit” entities don’t care about profit or cost - they’re NON-PROFIT!
We are achieving the environmentalist’s dream and we’re now concerned?
Recycling ping!
Recycle scam bump
bttt
This isn’t the first time this has happened.
NJ was one of the first states to mandate recycling.
We had to dutifully sort our recyclable in tied bundles of newspapers, cardboard, some had to sort colors of glass, bundles of magazines, etc.
Turns out there was no market except for the cardboard and the aluminum. All the rest of the stuff got carted off to landfills in Pennsylvania, neatly tied, bundled and sorted.
And this is after countless towns bought recycling trucks, paid for the men to operate them, etc., etc.
I’ve brought stuff to scrap yards and junkyards for many many years. Markets rule—if no one wants your commodity, you don’t get any money.
At least the scrap thieves have stopped robbing the copper and brass from the graveyards. Here i Delaware, the scrap yard has to keep the material for 18 days before shipping it out, so the thiefs here sold the stuff they filched up in Philadelphia, where, of course, no such holding periods exist. One graveyard had brass gates on a vault, with the person’s name on them, 100 years old, disappear. No one in Philly saw a thing, donchaknow.
In Delaware residents PAY $ 72.00/year for curbside pickup of now worthless recyclables, but it is voluntary. We just use a convenient drop off bin area, like about 150 others set up around Delaware.
The thing that is cool about Delaware is that, for the last thirty years, a PRIVATE company oversee all recycling by business and residents in the entire state. No tax money is used.
In NYS they force you to do much work sorting and rinsing. But now the labor to re-cycle it is more expensive than the raw products which are deflating. Maybe Obama can add that to the stimulus package, paid for by printed money.
Wish I could print money. Makes you wonder about savings. Something unsettling.
That's really funny. D'oh!