Posted on 03/16/2019 8:37:56 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities.
Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions.
The turmoil in the global scrap markets began affecting American communities last year, and the problems have only deepened.
With fewer buyers, recycling companies are recouping their lost profits by charging cities more, in some cases four times what they charged last year.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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.
...And do you think that taxes will go down if the pick-up program is shutdown?
Nope, Socialists never stop sucking at the public tit
Re: aluminum, it’s nutty, they recycle Al cans, which have plastic lining on the int and ext paint, but they won’t recycle Alum foil. Go figure.
The spousal unit is a absolute true believer.
At best token from me for show.
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....
At least he’s getting something for that minute portion of his property taxes.
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!
Yep. Pick up a barge full at LB and dump it 2500 miles out. go back for more.
—
And so the dreaded floating islands of garbage were created. So by eliminating plastic bags and straws, we will save the planet and the occasional sea animal ...
Recycling is where its at ...
Well I hope my town doesnt stop the “free” pick-up.
It’s like having a 2nd trash bin.
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That’s my take on it. I don’t care what they do with it but the extra can is sure helpful.
There’s no dump where you live? If so, you could rent a uhaul with some neighbors and everyone clean out their garage and split the fees.
Let our prisoners sort it out.
“...China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States...”
No wonder so much Chinese stuff is garbage.
As soon as the recycling craze began in the 70’s I thought it was bull caca.
“Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.”
No, it was forced upon us and we were taxed for it. We could have burnt it at very high temperatures with no pollution at all, but noooooooooooooo.
Unintended consequences of the left strike again.
...largest impact of the recycling program is to create more busywork government jobs,...
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Initially, recycling programs were funded via Federal grants. Every such grant mandates an administrator. In my area, those grants administrators make $20,000 per grant.
Aluminum foil is just as recyclable as aluminum cans, but some recycle programs
aren’t equipped to process foil. Aluminum foil is many times covered in food scraps
and most recycling facilities won’t accept food covered items.
The biggest accomplishment of the environmental movement as it relates to individuals happened way back in the early 70’s’s when people were convinced to stop tossing trash on the ground.
In the late 60’s students advertising and event would stand at one end of the campus walkway passing out flyers. When they were done, the surrounding area was papered with flyers, all over the sidewalk, the ground, and anywhere the wind took them. When I returned to the same campus two years later, the change was amazing. Hardly anyone tossed the flyers, even though they were still being distributed the same way. Instead they put them in the trash later.
I recall in the 50’s the sidewalks were for tossing stuff, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, matches, and anything else you happened to be getting rid of at the minute. Shopkeepers routinely swept the stuff on the sidewalks into the gutters and the gutters were cleaned by the start of business the next day. That all ended too, by the the early 70’s.
And none of it cost a tax dollar. In fact, it saved on street cleaning.
Then we went overboard...way, way, overboard.
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