Posted on 12/19/2019 10:06:42 AM PST by karpov
For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.
That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard. Since then, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia—other popular markets for the West’s trash—have implemented their own restrictions.
The moves have caused a seismic shift in how the world deals with its waste. Long used to shipping off trash to poorer countries to sort and process, nations are now faced with the question of what recycling is worth to them. They are undertaking new investments in domestic processing, ramping up alternative strategies such as incineration and rolling out education campaigns to teach homeowners to sort trash. Others are dropping programs altogether.
Recycling is “something that’s ingrained in you, and one day it suddenly all goes away,” said Kyle O’Brien, the town manager of Broadway, Va. The town had offered curbside recycling for two decades but canceled the service last year after Beijing started turning away the world’s recyclables. The company that processed the materials, van der Linde Recycling, closed its household waste processing facility, blaming the severe drop in prices.
For years, the world’s bottles and boxes made their way to China on ships that offered deep discounts to avoid returning empty after dropping off cargo in the U.S. and other countries. Since 1992, China has imported 45% of the world’s plastic waste
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
:)
I’m one of those that think a CO2 Level of around 2,000 PPM would be a good thing. So I do all I can to increase it. And I have 32 acres of field and forest that love the stuff. :)
Yep. Walmart bags.
The local gas station increased their premium gas from 30 cents more than regular to 60 cents more than regular, so I now have zero problem dropping my trash off there. My extra $3.50 a tank pays for it. (My FR-S requires that gas)
Bury it all on the moon.
A lunar-fill.
Maybe that would stop that moon from slowly inching away.
Drop all the trash into an active volcano.
Gov-co provides the ones we are forced to use.
For many years the bin was a large tote.
One earlier this year, my wife called all giddy about news. The big deal was we were getting wheeled bins. Yay....
When it arrived all new and blue, the spouse was in awe of the thing. True believer in recycling. Facts and math don’t register.
In my jurisdiction I have SEEN the recycling trucks that used to be fastidious about paper-in-one-truck, plastic-in-a-different-truck, now just toss it all together.
I think recycling is dead.
We just refuse to admit it.
I had about a gallon of what was either mineral oil or PCB-containing transformer oil. I didn’t know which it was.
I found out that the county hazardous waste collection people wouldn’t take it. There was no other way to get rid of it without an insane amount of paperwork.
I wanted to do the right thing, but “they” made it too damn hard.
I solved the problem by dumping it in with my everyday trash. Problem solved.
Watched neighbors sort their recycling into little bags, separating glass by color, plastics, etc. Watched the garbage truck worker toss the whole works into the same bin on the truck. LMAO.
I don’t mind recycling when it’s convenient for me, i.e. tossing stuff into one can vs. another. But it’s probably pointless.
We also live in rural SW Pa, so it's a lot different here than say, NYC.
Which is WHY we live here ……
As the late Sam Kenison famously said ………. MOVVVVE !
I don’t have a problem with it but in fact you’re not using “public” facilities, you’re using a facility paid for by those companies. Think about what would happen if everyone did that. However you slice it, it’s theft.
“To be sorted and made into new products” =
To be thrown into the ocean and/or incinerated.
I have one of those GIANT garbage bins, the kind that will hold livingroom furniture and kitchen appliances.
I sort NOTHING! Life is too short to play in garbage.
Gather it up and burn it, with enough natural gas to maintain high enough temperature. Separate out the metal and glass for actual recycling. Single stream will work.
So people “feel good”. Now, isn’t that special?!
The garage down the road has those tanks to dump used motor oil.
What do they do with it? They made a ‘oil dripper’ wood furnace and they mix diesel fuel in the old oil to thin it and they burn it to heat the garage!
Yes — this is a wheeled bin and I guess paper can be tossed in if I separated it in a bag. Hope so. Looks like most people have this blue one on my street. Looks handy dandy.
You could do that new Australian recycle where they use water, heat and pressure to convert just about anything to crude oil.
I used to sort out the recyclables, then I read a story in the paper that the city I live in sends all the stuff in the regular trash bags to a facility to be sorted for recyclables any way. So why should I bother?
I’ve been saying for years that if recycling made sense economically, there would be people bidding for my trash.
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