Posted on 05/30/2018 10:23:20 AM PDT by rktman
There’s an easy way to know what materials the recycling company loses money on.
Look at your cart after the homeless scavengers have been through it, but before the waste company picks it up.
The stuff that’s left in your cart is the stuff the company loses money on.
Recycling is mandatory in my town. I’ve even had garbage trucks (same owners as the recycler) refuse items they think are recyclable. Biggest problem: the recycling company demands that all items must be practically gift-wrapped. They want only “pristinely clean” items. Silly waste of time and money. And there’s no way I’m going to spend hours cleaning and sorting my trash. Screw ‘em.
They give us the recycle bins (green, ain’t that cute) and everyone uses them the same way they use the grey (regular trash) ones. Matters not what you do, you pay for recycling in your utility bill whether you use it or not. If they did aluminum only the city would make money not lose it. Well at least the homeless would make money and the city would save money by not having to pick it up.
When I lived in Japan, our local garbage pick-up location had a big cage for the recyclables. It was filled with a lot of bins, all reserved for different things - steel and iron, aluminum, other metals, two kinds of batteries, three or four kinds of plastics (each container there is marked to show what kind it is), paper, and clear and colored glass. All the sorting was done by each resident. This kind of recycling makes sense, since the garbage is pre-sorted and easy to sell to recyclers.
That makes sense, but I don’t think that kind of personal responsibility would work in most places in the US.
I’ve always heard all they do is take out the aluminum, which I have almost none of. I’ve never bothered to take the recycling charge off my bill, but I’m skeptical.
I do it to save the land fills, to reuse materials...to save on energy costs in making new materials,etc ...I try to reuse things and wash out zip lock bags...I don't run the water too much and I hang my clothes outside to dry...
yes, some of it is moot...sometimes it costs more to recycle something than to just make something new...
the BIGGEST thing we can all do is to stop BUYING so much stuff and then tossing it in a few yrs...
living simply...which I don't do but that is my ultimate goal.
They have recycling where I live. City provided recycling can. Metal, glass, plastic bottles, and large cardboard boxes are the only thing I recycle. Regular paper just goes in the trash. It’s biodegradable.
We never had a garbage recyling but there was a recycling center a couple of towns over which we’d haul big stuff to.
There was an aluminum can place a couple towns over in the opposite direction. They both shut down years ago. It wasn’t worth the gas to drive to them.
I reuse what I can out of necessity.
Compare:
1. A million people at the source of the garbage chain individual sorting garbage into various categories of garbage.
vs.
2. Those million people simply throwing all garbage into a single stream, and then, a single entrepreneur sorting himself various categories of garbage as it arrives in a single stream at his garbage facility.
Q: Which method is most efficient? Which method produces greater return of raw materials back into production of new products?
I was involved a few years back with the revamping of my towns transfer station in NH. Yes, we made money on Aluminum. At one point we made a lot of money on Aluminum. Not so much anymore.
All the other recycled items lower your cost per ton to haul away. Cardboard is by far the biggest volume item. There is a market for cardboard and brown paper bags. It is relatively easy to turn it back into cardboard and brown paper bags.
Tin cans(dog & cat food, etc.) all go right in with any scrap metal. You will get paid for it, but you need to truck it to the scrap yard. Your trucking costs will probably make you break even.
Construction waste like drywall, asphalt shingles, etc. all need to be separated out because they go to a different land fill than the general trash. This is the most expensive trash to dispose of. We charged residents to get rid of any of these items.
My former town of Wilton, NH had an incinerator. It was grandfathered in. They burned all the non recycled trash.
Recycling is not really a liberal/conservative issue IMHO. It is a fiscally responsible means of lowering my municipality’s cost of disposing of trash. There is not as much landfill space as you would think. Here in NH, almost all towns HAD a landfill. Ours has been capped for 25 years. By removing fiscally viable items from the trash stream it extends the landfill life. Recycling in my town SAVED us money. Therefore, controlling my property taxes.
Our county dump went to single stream recycling for everything but glass.
Ours too, back to the future I guess.
It doesn’t make sense. Most items have no to negative value so how does recycling make sense? Even if the items have value how does it makes sense for people to recycle who value their time at a greater value then the so called recyclables?
Most recycling is done at a net expense. Only forced labor i.e. mandatory recycling laws keep it viable.
“There is not as much landfill space as you would think.” But there is an almost infinite amount of space for landfills. So the left creates a landfill crisis that is used to help justify recycling. Landfill space need not be expensive. Energy could less expensive as well which would also degrade the value of recyclables.
All of the loony leftist policies that drive up manufacturing cost, landfill cost, environmental regulatory compliance costs, and government enforced slave labor for sorting, make this a true lib/prog vs conservative isssue.
There is far more landfill space than you can possibly imagine.
For many libtards, the actual cause doesn’t really matter.
As long as they can ‘make believe’, its enough for THEM (listening to democrats and ‘believing’ ...) .
Recycling corks at your nearest BevMo ... Seriously do they make mini-life preservers (a traditional us of cork material) for pets or something outa this trash.
“Morons are easily led” - Lenin
I discovered that empty plastic bottles were put on massive ships and sent over seas for recycling
**************
Only an off the wall answer but recycled plastic would reduce
the crude required for making new bottles. The question then
becomes would the recycling process cost more or less than the
replacement crude.
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