Recycling Madness (Florence King!)

National Review Online | 3 May 1999 | Florence King

[alfa6]

First off let me say that I have been out of the plastic recycling business for about 7 years.

However, when I was in the business there were many products that could be made out of recyled soda bottles and milk jugs.
The largest use for recyled soda bottles was, believe it or not, carpet fibers. PET makes a great durable carpet fiber.
Milk Jugs and other HDPE and LDPE plastics can be recyled in many different ways. Some of the composite lumber that is being sold uses recyled HDPE. Also we has customers that used or HDPE to make antifreeze and winshield washer fluid bottles.

I will enclose a link for one of my old customers. They used a lot of our HDPE plastic in their process.

I suspect that the reason that plastic recycling has not enjoyed the same entusiasim as aluminum cans is the economics of the respective products. Recycling aluminum cans represents a huge energy savings versus the energy it takes to make an aluminum can from ore. Some cost estimates that I had seen stated that there was as much as a 90% savings in energy by using recycled cans.

When I was in the recyling business even at the best of times there was probably not the huge savings in using recyled plastic feed stock versus virgin plastics as there is in recyling aluminum.. In many of the applications I was familar with the recyled plastic was used as an extender to stretch the virgin plastic. Along this line I had a customer who bought our recyled plastic drum material to use as an extender for making the frames that held styrofoam concrete forms together.

Links below for Coon Manufacturing, this was one of our customers and a link to a manufacturer of styrofoam concrete forms that were similar to what out customer was making.

http://www.coonmfginc.com/

http://www.contourfoam.com/rcontrol/products/building_products/building/icf/icf.aspThesed guys were not out customer but the poduct is very similar.

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[Casloy]

Apparently there are a lot of products that can be made from recycled materials. My question would be, and it is an honest question and not a rhetorical one, is it more expensive to make products out of recycled material over virgin materials? Are there tax incentives for companies that use recycled plastic over virgin plastic? This entire recycling obsession began with a report written in the 70's ( could have been 80's) claiming we were running out of landfill space. The report was badly flawed and poor science and has since been debunked. It made a claim that if we didn't begin recycling in a massive way we would soon be swamped with garbage. It came out at about the same time as a big barge of garbage was moving all around the world trying to find a place to dump it's load. It's now moved from a simple environmentally sound way to deal with garbage, to a religion. Having the "made from recycled paper" on a greeting card or soda cup is like a bumper sticker that says "I care."

If it were true that we had no landfill space left then perhaps the cost of recycling would make sense. But we aren't out of space and technology affords a lot of better ways to dispose of our garbage than paying people to sort through it, then ship it possibly hundreds of miles to be made into products which could be made cheaper with virgin raw materials. Add up all the time and money spent sorting and recycling and there simply has to be a better use of our time and money to improve the environment.

[alfa6]

That is a question that I do not have a good answer to. On one hand the little ol lady that saves her small bag of recyclables and then has to drive to a recycling center that is say 10 or 15 miles out of her way is probably not a very efficent use of resources.

We had several suppliers that were able to save a boatload of bucks on their trash bill because each day on my way to work I would pick up the plastic that they wanted recycled. This company went from having 2 8cu yd dumpsters picked up every day to a once a week pick up.

In the final analysis if it make economc sense then the market will support the rectcling of materials. Aluminum as I mentioned before is a good example of this. Coon Manufacturing to my knowledge was not getting tax subsidies from the state. They were one of the pioneers in using recycled plastic. If oil prices continue to go up then we may see more economic pressure to recycle plastics.

Have to run off for a while.

Regards

alfa6 ;>}