With exceptions recycling has always been a waste of natural resources.
It’s satisfying to see things starting to be correctly realigned.
The reality of what can reasonably be recycled is far short of the pipe dream.
The type of plastic, how clean the cans & bottles are, the cost of collection & transport, etc. all make it not worthwhile.
Add to this the fact that most of the Pacific plastic patch comes from the third world, China, etc.
But hey, it makes a bunch of people feel good about themselves.
I abandoned it in the 1970’s. Me, bears........smarter.
Well I hope my town doesnt stop the “free” pick-up.
It’s like having a 2nd trash bin.
Our county just stopped recycling glass. Now we are just supposed to throw it in the regular trashcan.
My town of about 18,000 which is run by Liberal/Leftist wackos diverted a lot of money in the budget from snow removal to recycling. We had a bad winter and they didn’t have enough money for snow removal. There would have been plenty of money for snow removal without recycling. So now they want new taxes.
I believe aluminum is the only thing worth recycling. Reduce & reuse makes more sense.
Most of it goes to China to be burnt, but lately, trying to clean up its air, China just dumps it directly from the transport ships into the Pacific Ocean ...
And we see yet another “feel good” program fail. The world awaits for real answers and liberals present smoke and mirrors.
Statement from millionaire AL Gore yet?
I told my father a few years ago to stop wasting water ( it’s a fortune here in MA) to clean out bottles for recycling.
He never believed me.
I showed him the penn & teller he thought it was BS.
Whatever....it makes him “Feeeel good”
A plastic bottle or a Styrofoam cup becomes a a TINY dot when broken down.
It’s the VOLUME of this stuff that is the problem.
If homes had a shredder to break this stuff down it would be far more effective that the recycle business.
Like others, our county collects and processes the ‘recyclables’ at great cost.
Then sorts through them at the expensive Recycling Center where very little is actually recycled.
(mostly aluminum cans that were previously recycled by little old ladies and kids at no cost to the county)
Then the county loads most of it back on trucks and drives it to the “Solid Waste Disposal Center” where it goes through another sorting process.
There a small amount of it is actually recycled by shredding it into compost and mulch.
Then the large remainder is trucked to the landfill along with other useless garbage.
The largest impact of the recycling program is to create more busywork government jobs, wear out more vehicles and burn up a lot of gasoline and diesel fuel driving garbage from here to there to there.
Just recycle metals. The rest is carbon. Putting it in a dump is good for the environment.
I guess the difference is that people now realize what has ALWAYS been true, that recycling is a fraud, and always had been (well, I doubt they know that). I still remember John Stossel (reporter dude) doing a report 15 years ago tracking where the crap goes. He found that aluminum did actually get melted and reused (and that explains why private entities pay for it), but paper was tough, and a lot couldn’t be ‘recycled’, and forget plastic - it was put on a barge and sent to Taiwan - and now we learn it was either burned there for energy or dumped in the ocean on the way (whichever was more practical).
As typical...no one cared about his report.
“Amid the soaring costs, cities and towns are making hard choices about whether to raise taxes, cut other municipal services or abandon an effort that took hold during the environmental movement of the 1970s.”
The environmentalist response will be more restrictions (different bins for different products) and requirements for more cleaning of refuse. All enforced with a series of trash inspectors to ensure compliance and/or issue citations.
I used to be in the wholesale office coffee business....
Lots of companies were into buying eco friendly cups instead foam coffee cups....to be “green”
They could buy the eco friendly cups at about twice the cost of a foam cup and they pretty much leaked all the time because of the green material they were made from..
That same green cup got tossed into the trash bin and never got recycled.
When they complained about the cost save yourself a headache and ask everyone to bring a coffee mug....
My idiot neighbors all pay $10 a month MORE, just for the privilege of “recycling”... They mocked me for not ‘caring about the environment”.... that was 10 years ago.
Last year, a TV report exposed that all of the “recycle” crap was going to the SAME landfill as the regular garbage, and had been for years.
Who’s laughing now, suckers!
Let our prisoners sort it out.