Posted on 02/04/2020 8:29:21 AM PST by karpov
Baltimore County residents' have had their perceptions about where their glass ends up shattered.
Over the weekend, news broke that the county—which does not include the City of Baltimore—has not been recycling the glass it's been collecting as part of its recycling program. For the past seven years, the jars and bottles that residents dutifully placed in their blue bins have been being junked instead.
"There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing quality material," county spokesperson Sean Naron told The Baltimore Sun.
Glass recycling reportedly stopped in 2013, the same year the county opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility, according to the Sun article.
Single-stream recycling refers to the practice of letting people put all their recyclables into one bin, then sorting it at material processing facilities, rather than have people sort their papers, plastics, and glass into separate containers at the curb.
Baltimore County had adopted single-streaming for all homes by October 2010, part of a growing trend among municipalities trying to boost recycling rates. The thinking was that if you make recycling easier, more people will do it.
A study from the American Forest & Paper Association found the percent of the population covered by a single-stream recycling service that included glass grew from 22 percent in 2005 to 73 percent in 2014.
The trouble with single-streaming is that placing everything in the same bin increases the chances of contamination. Non-compatible materials get mixed together or coated with food waste. So a good deal of the glass isn't pure enough to ground down and be shipped to glass manufacturers.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
‘When ritual is more important than reuse’
Nice turn of phrase there.
Same in Pittsburgh. Residents still required to recycle all kinds of stuff. So near as anyone knows they lose money on everything but aluminum cans. Yet the program rolls on just as it always has. Virtue signal uber alles.
In the building where I worked (pre retirement) some snoopy workers followed the recycling company after hours and caught them dumping all the “recycle” stuff into the regular trash.
I suspect this happens very often—a windfall for the recycling company and nobody is the wiser.
Loads the trash from one dumpster and the “recycle” dumpster into the same garbage truck.
Like rapist-detection kits, it all just sits on the shelf
to serve the Democrats/terrorists.
Seven years and no one leaked out the news?
Some years ago a sanitation worker friend told me everything goes to the dump 90 percent of the time.
I guess that’s changed.
“For the past seven years, the jars and bottles that residents dutifully placed in their blue bins have been being junked instead.”
Does it really matter? What counts is that Leftists can have a smug look on their faces as they walk away from the ‘recycle bin’, having done their part.
I remember seeing a news segment back in the late 1980s. A bimbo reporter followed a trash truck to the dump in South Jersey and did a gotcha interview when he was filmed dumping old newspapers and phone books. The truck driver said “lady if you find somebody that will buy this stuff Ill bring it there.” This has been going on for decades.
Walmart won’t recycle glass either. Just plastic and aluminum.
Today my daughter is a land use and environmental attorney.
Pensacola’s curbside recycling has gone to landfill for at least two months:
All they did was recycle money from their hand to gubmint!
Cost of transporting the glass to be recycled costs more in resources and cash than to just make glass from all new material.
A lot of the recycling companies around here have stopped taking glass.
The Soylent Green Processing Centers have the same issue.
All those pesky Dentures, Dental Veneers, Mechanical Heart Valves and Hip and Knee Replacement Parts really gum up the works.
class action
This was happening 48 years ago in other places. separate colored and clear glass, truck comes and takes both to the landfill.
But it makes people feel so good about themselves!
btt
“including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments”
That’s the essence of the recycling dilemma: tons of pure steel, glass, silicon, paper, plastics are mixed together in our manufactured products.
Steel is in our trash but it’s cheaper to mine ore and smelt it into huge pure ingots which are then divided into relatively small pieces and scattered within our manufactured products.
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