Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling

AFP ^ | July 12, 2018

[Aevery_Freeman]

Actually, Recyclying is a misnomer.

[Parmy]

So true!!!

[huldah1776]

We shouldn’t let them recycle all our steel. We should recycle all our paper and plastic or better yet, give the business to south american countries that need jobs.

[MinorityRepublican]

I don't have statistics but it appears to me that it is mostly inefficient to recycle items because you will have to truck them to the site, then sort them out before you are able to process it.

If it's steel, then of course it is worth the money to recycle that. Need some hard data here, if someone could post a link here to educate me, that would be great. Thanks!

[mass55th]

I guessed that the garbage was in Washington/Baltimore before I even read the body of the article. Where else would it be piling up?

[roadcat]

I take all my kitchen waste, yard and garden waste and paper or box waste, put it in an old blender.

Nice idea! I toss a lot of waste into a compost bin that's full of worms, and turn it weekly. The resulting soil and hundreds of worms go into the garden. Never thought of using a blender to make a smoothee, that would certainly speed up the compost process. I hope my wife doesn't mind me using her blender...

[Steven Scharf]

One day it might make economic sense to mine old landfills for resources and then someone will do it.
Until then, burn what will burn (to get rid of disease) and pile up the rest.

Portland ME and the surrounding towns have a regional trash and recycling consortium: ecomaine. We burn our trash in a highly efficient incinerator that converts to electricity. During the ressession volume was so low that they were digging up landfilled material to burn. It served a secondary purpose of freeing up landfill space for eventual Ash disposal.

Separately, later on as part of a study of the old Ash the dug it up and sifted out the metal that the high heat incinerator had not dealt with. They were able to sell this metal and again free up more landfill space. They now sift out the metal before disposal.

As part of a prior business I would take stuff to ecomaine. I was amazed at the amount of metal people dump.y company always separated and sold our metal debris.

[The FIGHTIN Illini]

BFL