Recycling centers close, eliminating 'green' jobs

LA Times ^ | November 30, 2009 | By Shane Goldmacher

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Reporting from Sacramento - Recycling centers across California are closing, and scores of troubled youths are being tossed from "green" jobs onto unemployment rolls in the wake of Sacramento's raid on bottle deposit funds.

California's recycling treasury, filled by consumers' nickel and dime deposits on drink containers, had hummed along successfully for two decades until state officials left it nearly bankrupt after taking $451 million out to help balance the budget.

The unredeemed deposits that subsidized recycling facilities and such projects as a local conservation corps are virtually gone, leaving the programs in the lurch.

[reformedliberal]

Being rural, our collection is unpaid, as we deliver everything, pre-sorted, to the town dump. One person has a paid position to manage the dump. There is a 4-hour collection period each Saturday morning. We have heard that everything except aluminum is just put into the landfill. IIRC, there is some sort of payment schedule to the dump based on volume. I am unsure how it works.

The recycling plants, where trash is resorted and dumpsters washed, are often located near minimum security corrections facilities, allowing the inmates to earn enough to pay for their incarceration.

A few years ago, one of the local PhD psyches mentioned that he has a lot of art student clients, most of whom were placed in therapy by parents who didn't want to see the insurance coverage for mental health "go to waste." Uniformly, the art students told him that they wanted to work with recyclable material. At the time, the media was full of articles lauding various product lines that began with discarded materials.

I have noticed fewer of these articles in the past few years.

[Timeout]

In the beginning, the most common justification for recycling was that it saves landfill space. This was during the 1980’s when we were carpet bombed with scary stories about landfill capacity and garbage barges.

Ask yourself: how long has it been since you read a national news story about landfill capacity? I’d bet at least 15 years. Like so many other things, it was simply the environmental alarm du jour.

[Fetid Facts]

"Ten years ago, I was griping about having to wash out used food cans and the woman I was with told me:'It makes me feel better about myself.'”

She might want to consider plugging the tub during her two-minute shower and reuse the water to wash the cans. She'd feel even better.

[SouthTexas]

I’m rural enough to not even have it! :)

What I don’t like are the silly games they play with some of this. Years ago, you could sell car/truck batteries at the junkyard. There were guys that even came around to collect them. Now you have to pay a disposal fee every time you buy a new one.

What changed?

[Republic Rocker]

Duh.... the same Big Gov type geniuses that run the Postal Service, DMV and so on.... same result.

[wbill]

I've not read the book, but my understanding is that the only stuff that is worth recycling is metal, simply because of the massive amounts of energy the smelting processes take.

Everything else is consumer-driven feelgoodism. And frankly, those feel-good dollars that pay a premium for "25% Post-Consumer Napkins" dry up real quick.

[SouthTexas]

Have had the Post Office discussion elswhere already this morning. LOL

[discostu]

You can always tell which stuff is worth the time to recycle because people will pay you to take it (which currently pretty much means it’s metal). Anything the government needs to cajole you into recycling belongs in the dump.

[Reeses]

basically an enormous waste of money because the recycled materials aren’t worth anything close to what it costs to recycle them.

One of the most reliable and unbiased indicators of how many resources something consumes, how green it is, is its price. If a city starts a recycling program and everyone's garbage bill doubles, about twice as many resources are being consumed than before, and the environment is worse off.