Posted on 10/04/2015 11:43:28 AM PDT by reaganaut1
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Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, its still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, Recycling Is Not Dead!
While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, its popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston dont have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.
The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then theres a crisis to confront, says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?
Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Not always. I used to work in a steel mill (60 years ago) that did a lot of "recycling" before the term was invented. That is, we mixed a lot scrap steel into the molten iron that went into the converter.
In general, though, you are correct. Recycling is pretty much of a loser. If it paid off, it wouldn't need to be a religion. People would do it because it was profitable.
Best comment I’ve read in a long time.
Most of the mini steel mills that use EAFS, electric arc furnaces, use 100% or nearly, scrap to produce steel.
“Thats simply not true, it requires very large amounts of money to be confiscated from taxpayers.”
You know, you’re simply making that up.
In the county I live in, the recycling program is run as an enterprise fund of the county and actually turns a profit that is used to fund a number of other related programs.
Much of the revenues come from contracts and services to large commercial organizations who find it much cheaper to pay to have recyclable materials hauled to the recycling center for processing rather than paying to have those materials hauled to a landfill because landfill tipping fees are so expensive.
The same is actually true for private individuals here: our overall solid waste fees are actually reduced because it’s cheaper for the haulers to rid themselves of the recyclable materials at the county processing center rather than paying the tipping fees to dispose of those materials at a landfill.
Ah, so you do believe me.
Otherwise you would have quoted all the pertinent information I posted;
“Thats simply not true, it requires very large amounts of money to be confiscated from taxpayers.
The proof?
How many of the non-metal recycling efforts are operated by private enterprise unsubsidized?”
Your conversation reminds me tiff that went on in my house. One person insisted on emptying the bath and bedroom trash cans everyday.
My stance was I’ll empty them when they either get full or start stinking.
I got 4 whopping CENTS per pound last time I brought steel in. 600+ pounds of steel, a whole $15.25 in my pocket.
The diesel I burned hauling the stuff in cost nearly that much!
A thing I noticed is that mexicans just throw down their trash wherever they happen to be standing at the moment.
It’s almost as if they have no sense of civic responsibility, and assume a white person will sooner or later come along to clean up after them (a police officer told me that).
Their disposal of dirty diapers all along the highways and byways of Texas is a hate crime IMO.
I think they do it on purpose to despoil our country. It’s a passive aggressive act.
The word also was supposed to be ALMOST. My bad. Almost always recycling costs more.
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