Posted on 07/12/2018 6:36:11 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
China Throws the Recycling Scam in the Trash Now you get to do the work that China wont. July 12, 2018 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
The huge dirty secret of recycling was also one of the worlds worst polluters.
Every branch of government from Washington D.C. to your local town council had spent a fortune convincing people that recycling is a magical process that turns your old pizza boxes into new pizza boxes while creating those imaginary green jobs in the community. The reality was a lot dirtier.
All of Americas industries, including trash sorting, had been outsourced to China.
And recycling is just a fancy lefty way of saying "trash." All that recycling, which children in progressive communities are taught to sort as the closest thing to a religious ritual, was really being dumped by the ton on dirty ships and sent over to China. We werent recycling it. The Chinese were.
But now China is banning foreign recycling because its bad for the environment.
Even the Communists got tired of sorting through the trash of American socialists. The recycling scam shipped garbage on dirty ships for dirty industries while pretending that theyre clean and green.
There was never anything clean about it. And only the money it brought in was green.
Now the recycling partys over. Plastic recycling imports were banned early this year. Even fiber has trouble getting in to the Peoples Republic. Chinas mixed paper standards mean that most of the recycled cardboard and paper no longer passes muster. Instead its piling up in the United States.
The recycling scam used to be an easy trade. China shipped its cheap products made from recycled American junk and scrap here. The empty vessels used to dump Chinese junk products on America were then filled up with tons of recycling for the return trip back to China at minimal cost.
We sent them junk, they sent us junk. As the trade deficit grew, recycling was one of its many parasites.
But China is out of the recycling dump business. And the recycling business depended on it. No other market pays what it did. And no other country has the industrial scale to handle this much recycled trash. The American market is flooded with recycling that no one wants and trash prices have imploded.
And thats having an immediate impact on the progressive recycling programs in the United States.
Californias trash is going right back to landfills. 62% of exported materials used to go to China. But no more. Californias Department of Resources Recycling sent a letter cautioning that the economics of recycling had become unfavorable thus challenging what recycling means to Californians.
It also warned recycling facilities that, public health and safety should be their number one priority.
In Massachusetts, mountains of trash recycling are piling up and theres talk that trucks may stop picking it up. In Pennsylvania, a "recycling crisis created by China" was blamed for a refusal to accept paper. In Seattle and Phoenix, recycling is going into landfills. Fees are going up in Portland. In Pasco, recycling was abandoned before its start. In a Kansas City plant, one out of four items is going into a landfill. In Sacramento, where all of Californias recycling rules are made, most recyclables no longer are.
Fort Worths recycling brought in nearly a million last year. Now, its expected to cost $1.6 million.
Recology used to be the epitome of the reinvented garbage hauler, merging San Francisco urban politics with progressive PR about ending waste. But zero landfill talk has given way to a blunter reality, Theres no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we cant recycle we take to a landfill.
Environmental regulations had already turned garbage collection in California into an expensive disaster, but this is an entirely unprecedented mess complete with mountains of trash and mountains of bills.
Recycling has become economically unsustainable, but that doesnt mean its going away.
Theres too much money in environmental scams. And recycling is the biggest of them. The China crisis is being met with the three Rs of progressive policymaking; rent-seeking, regulations and robbery.
Some homeowners are already seeing higher trash collection fees. Those will only get worse. Especially on the West Coast where the China option helped dull the painful costs of recycling. But the costs will hit everyone as politicians resort to mandating higher levels of recycled content in everyday products.
Want to sell soda, tissues or milk? Pay the politically connected recycling companies for the privilege of using their trash. As recycling costs go up, content mandates will force companies to create an artificial market. And the costs will be passed along to consumers who will have to pay more for everything.
Like higher trash fees, tightened recycling regulations have also only begun to arrive. If you live in a blue state or city, expect to spend a lot more time sorting your trash, cleaning your cans and removing plastic from your envelopes so that they meet Chinas new high standards for imported trash.
China will no longer be sorting American trash. So progressives have decided that you will.
We hear about the jobs that Americans wont do. But this is a job that the Chinese wont do. And that Americans will be forced to do for free. As China becomes more capitalist, America turns Communist.
Or as a video on the Recology site prompts, How to be a better recycle because China demands it.
Environmentalist municipalities have already begun rolling out condescending campaigns berating homeowners for their foolish and lazy recycling practices. Wishcycling is a charmless portmanteau you will see more of. But what it really means is that homeowners who are already being taxed to death are being hectored by the environmental activists they subsidize who have never worked a day in their lives.
Will all of that save the recycling scam?
No, but it wont matter. Most homeowners have no idea how much of their recyclables go into landfills anyway. The dirty business of municipal waste contracts will continue on uninterrupted. The extra fees and costs will be another one of the lefts thousand cuts that are bleeding the middle class to death.
Homeowners will be taxed harder so that crony cash can flow to even bigger recycling operations. You will pay more for everything you buy to subsidize politically connected, but uneconomical enterprises.
Recycling is not a reality, but an idea. Like Communism, it can never be achieved, but must be aspired to.
Smaller towns and cities will be forced to dump their recycling programs. And more conservative areas will be dissuaded from getting on board as the profit margins from recycling turn into pools of red ink. But blue states and cities will never abandon recycling. And if Washington D.C. goes blue again, the dictates of crony socialism and green fanaticism will roll out new compulsory standards nationwide.
Recycling is in crisis. But the environmental scam is too big to fail.
The ships carrying most of the blue state and city green trash will no longer be allowed into China. But there are other countries and continents desperate enough to take their socialist trash.
The dirty secret of recycling is that it depended on the willingness of Third World countries to greenwash our trash so that progressives could pretend that their moral garbage was saving the planet.
The smaller countries of Southeast Asia dont have the capacity to take up Chinas slack, but the Peoples Republic has progressively been colonizing Africa. Some African countries were already being used to recycle and dump e-waste. The shipping wont be as cheap, but recyclings next stop is likely to be Africa where environmentalists will turn it into a trash heap
to protect the environment.
Our recycle bin is just outside the kitchen door to the garage. I just open the door and throw the empty beer and whiskey bottles in. Thats the extent of my recycling and only because of the convenience for me.
Great article. Thanks for posting.
Ping
Anything else? Just makes people feel good about themselves.
Paper, glass,and metal recycling to me makes sense since they are basic raw materials that can be reused.
Paper though can only be reused a certain number of times before the fibers become too small to be repurposed.
glass and metals can be melted down and reformed into something else.
Feeling good about one’s self is far more important to the typical idiot.
I never got into the recycling craze. Everything I discard goes straight to the dump. Newspapers, old telephone books, electronics...you name it, to the dump it goes.
BINGO!
But - it's a large amount of similar material, all clean and separated, and they already likely have a market for it.
Buncha unsorted, non-clean household trash? Who wants it?
We save our plastic shopping bags for trash can liners. The rest we donate to our church where the ladiea crochet them into blankets for the homeless.
Only thing I recycle is copper, brass and lead.
Cue the dump sequence in “The Getaway”. (The first one)
“The shipping wont be as cheap, but recyclings next stop is likely to be Africa where environmentalists will turn it into a trash heap ..”
Save on shipping...we already have plenty of pre existing garbage dumps right here- Camden, Gary, East St. Louis, Detroit, Compton etc.
The amount of energy recycling seems enormous compared to the plastic saved.
I mean just a gallon of gas spent driving to the recycling center is far more then the $0.0002 cents worth of plastic recycled.
I am all for separating it into different colored bags and then letting the sorting be done at collection centers (Welfare people need jobs) But the minimal amount of energy spent should be all that is done.
If recycling was economically viable, we’d be paid for our trash.
The fact is Americans pay to recycle their trash.
Another fact, it HARMS the environment to recycle anything but Aluminum from residential areas.
Commercial recycling makes sense for metals of all kinds and paper when in bulk, but that’s it.
“glass”
Glass is never a viable recycled material. It is far cheaper to make new glass than to melt, cleanse, and reformulate old glass.
It costs far (meaning it also takes more) more in diesel fuel to haul that stuff to a glass recycler than it ever saves in energy otherwise.
Wow...this dovetails perfectly with today’s Jerusalem Thread about “Virtue Signaling”. (I guess I can stop recycling now)
Great Minds Think Alike? LOL! :-)
“Shocking study reveals 90% of global plastic waste comes from just TEN rivers in Asia and Africa”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3669635/posts
Exactly. Penn and Teller also pointed out that creating papter from trees is a simple and pretty environmentally friendly endeavor. And we grow the trees now like we grow corn.
Recycling paper involves all sorts of chemical processes to remove ink, dyes, etc. It makes no sense and is more harmful than just starting from scratch.
Like Jay Lenno sez about Doritos, “[Use] all you want. We’ll make more.”
I've always suspected that the recyclables we are forced to put out bi-monthly wound up in the same place as the rest of the refuse. Now it will be worse.
We'll have to see how Waste Management reacts to this new paradigm.
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