Posted on 03/09/2019 7:18:11 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors discover that you havent recycled appropriately.
But now much of that carefully sorted recycling is ending up in the trash.
For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper magazines, office paper, junk mail and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
Most are choosing the latter. We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we cant afford it, said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklins residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didnt want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned.
*SNIP*
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Ditto that.
There was a time when dealers BOUGHT papers from homeowners. It was a good deal. Came right to the house.
__________________
I remember the rag man. In a horse-drawn wagon!
Way more shoplifting than old times. Bulky, heavy plastic container on a screwdriver is harder to hide than a tool wrapped in light weight paper.
Sorry if I seem cynical; but, the town I have lived in for 30+ years has changed so that people here shoplift right in front of you. I was in the grocery store a while back, and there was a tall black man with a large backpack emptying the shelves of canned stew and other items. Right in the backpack and out the door. That was when I realized why this particular store is so much more expensive. People seem to think that they are entitled to take what they want and, since no one actually stops them, they are right.
“I remember the rag man. In a horse-drawn wagon!”
—
Me too! Simpler times.
4:28
Seinfeld: The Michigan Deposit Bottle Scam
YouTube
We have a Speed Queen washer, one of the slightly older ones before they re designed it and ruined them.
The dryer is an old Maytag that we’ve repaired a few times.
But then again, I hang my laundry out so the wear and tear on the dryer is minimal.
We have a Jenn Aire stove which I am ambivalent on and a Whirlpool fridge that just is the little energizer bunny.
We also have an older freezer in the basement that just keeps going as well.
One of the problems with repairs is that the electronic control pads are so stinking expensive to replace that people just toss the entire thing and replace it. You get a brand new stove or microwave for about the same money as replacing the computer touch pad.
Yes, I live on a farm, too, and admit to generating an inordinate amount of trash, so much of which is burned. But this isn’t feasible on a large scale, and probably not admirable on my small scale, so I really do wonder how we’ll deal with this issue as a country.
What a joke. You could take all the trash generated in the US for 100 years
and it would take up a 25 x 10 mile area 400 feet deep. We are NOT running out of landfill. It’s a big country....
“If you keep filling up this landfill for 100 years, and if you assume that during this time the populations of the United States doubles, then the landfill will cover about 160,000 acres, or 250 or so square miles, with trash 400 feet deep.
Here’s another way to think about it. The Great Pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet at the base and is 481 feet tall, and anyone who has seen it in real life knows that it’s a huge thing — one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.”
“There are none left. All out of business.”
None? Last count was about 1600.
I lived in a big city in an elegant house on a main street.
We eventually got an electric refrigerator and an oil furnace...which was eventually converted to gas. Life was good. Dad worked hard for us.
***people here shoplift right in front of you.***
I remember a similar case years ago. A store owner wanted cops to stop the shoplifting in his store, but he would never press charges when shoplifters were caught. He just wanted the police to stop the shoplifting.
The police left the store as they had more pressing things to do.
I have neighbors who pay the govt to take their “recyclables” each week. When it became obvious that this went to a landfill, they continue their idiocy...to this day. They are drones without the ability to think.
Because its not profitable... using recycled glass rather than make glass from scratch does save about 30% on the raw material cost , but the cost of transporting the recycled glass the plant is as much of that 30% saved or more.
Pure and simple, glass is heavy and costs a lot to transport, which is why nearly everything that can be packaged in plastic is now packaged that way and not in glass.
The technology exists to turn plastics, rubber, organics, etc into petroleum, which can then be refined into things like kerosene and gasoline. It needs to improve a lot more before it’s efficient enough to be cost-effective, but it’s a start.
For that matter, most plastics can be turned into crude oil using a setup not too different from a moonshine still. I have some ideas for making that more cost-effective, but it probably wouldn’t scale very well.
At any rate, the conversion process is about at the “punch-card computer” stage. It’ll be a while before it competes with other processes. But when it reaches that stage, landfill owners will be sitting on gold mines.
all metals, particularly non-ferrous metals, will always be worth recycling due to the high energy costs of smelting virgin metals and/or the the rarity of the ore itself ...
“Why can’t environmentalists start up a company instead of using the force of government.”
That’s always my first thought, too! You see a PROBLEM and you work hard to come up with a SOLUTION.
But, you know, Free Market/Capitalism is soooo SCAREY! (Or Enviros have no concept of it, are taught all their lives that it’s EVIL, etc.)
So, just keep whining about it, LOL!
Thirty plus years ago I started up incinerators that, due to their design, were virtually pollution free. Im sure the technology has improved since then. Fears of incinerators polluting are invalid.
re “Triniton “
Do you mean Trinitron?; Sony trademark for a color TV CRT that referred to the special CRT construction that produced superior image.
This followed by their flat screen CRTs, one of which I bought back in the day ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron
“The name Trinitron was derived from trinity, meaning the union of three, and tron from electron tube, after the way that the Trinitron combined the three separate electron guns of other CRT designs into one.”
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