Posted on 10/04/2015 11:43:28 AM PDT by reaganaut1
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Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”
While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.
The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”
Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Recyclers pay you for iron and steel too (not cans but engines and cars).”
Took a mid-sized dead lawn tractor to the recycle place. $11. That’s all!
I just finished reading Ann Coulter’s “Adios America” and what struck me is how dirty(trash wise)the Mexicans are. Here in FL I have been noticing tons of trash just thrown out of cars onto the ground,usually with a trash can a short distance away. It then struck me that they never saw the Indian crying. They don’t have any stake in this country or pride in keep common areas clean. Just toss the diaper onto the ground at Walmart and keep going. I just saw a commentary on the Muslims trashing Europe.
Meh. Reusing is generally a better way to go than recycling.
Of course, there’s not really much you can do either way when you live in most condos/apartment complexes. No recycling options, and no yard to toss food compost. Either way I still toss most of it behind the bushes outside my condo, seems like that bush is growing faster than most of the others :p
The last steel I sold recently was about 0.5 cents/lb.
Means your lawn tractor probably weighed around 400 lb. The price of new materials would be around $100. So that $89 gap must be larger than the sorting, transport, cutting, melting costs to make it profitable. Anyway its a 9:1 ratio. Aluminum has a much tighter ratio, around 2:1. But they both pay out money...because of authentic market drivers. Btw, steel and iron have dropped like a rock, ever since China decided to quit building empty cities. In 2007 you would have been paid $60 for that old mower.
I make more money with my crushed beer cans!
Using todays prices, when you use and recycle aluminum products, you lose 35 cents a pound. When you use and recycle steel, you lose around 22 cents a pound. You may get paid more for aluminum, but that’s only half the equation.
No it doesn't.
At least be honest with yourself, admit that it makes you feel better, or maybe proud because you can lord your holiness over other, less educated, individuals.
We use money as a measure of efficiency, and if it cost more, you are wasting energy to recycle. More energy than if you didn't recycle. That's wasteful.
Regards landfills, most of the country has far more landfill space than we will use in a thousand years.
Back in the early 70’s when this movement started the great thinking Marxist concluded that our trash would be so coveted that tptb would even pay us to haul our trash away.
You make it sound like recycling requires that very little money is extracted from taxpayers unwilling pockets.
That’s simply not true, it requires very large amounts of money to be confiscated from taxpayers.
The proof?
How many of the non-metal recycling efforts are operated by private enterprise unsubsidized?
Very, very few, if any. These are all government enterprises with limitless budgets, and no accountability.
Even the post up thread, I’ll wager that the company receives government assistance of some sort directly related to the recycling.
It’s very wasteful to recycle most things we throw away in our daily lives.
HELP SAVE THE EARTH...........STOP RECYCLING.
Assuming they paid a fair price, and I think they actually over paid for that mower, it simply reflects how competitively efficient it is to build a new mower out of new raw materials.
Subtract the cost to get the mower to the scrapyard, probably several dollars for the gas, and your donated time, and it shows how even recycling metals is barely profitable in terms of energy in vs. energy out. Had you not recycled, a new, comparable mower, the price increase would only be $10.
I don’t recycle at all. The recycling container that my little city gave me is in my garage filled with my stuff. I throw all my cans and bottles away.
Yep, that was a very enlightening episode.
While they cuss a lot, I showed the episode on climate / environmentalism, too to my kids. That environmentalism was eco-everything and essentially Earth worship.
Like you I have nothing against people recycling if they want to, but it should be completely voluntary, and understood that for the most part it has nugatory benefit.
You are a sans-culotte after my own heart.
No, it doesn't.
The fact that it costs more tells us that more resources and labor will be involved in recycling the stuff than throwing it away and making new stuff from scratch.
You sound as if you just think it's a good thing without thinking about the actual costs of recycling.
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