Posted on 05/20/2021 5:27:04 AM PDT by Kaslin
America’s recycling is in the dumps. Once the focus of Do-It-Yourself environmentalism, many recycling dreams are collapsing.
Households have willingly accepted burdens of sorting their trash. But big companies have broken their word by failing to reuse more of the packaging they sell. Unless we require them to reprocess more old products into new ones, they won’t do it.
This once-hidden problem rose to the surface when China in 2018 quit buying America’s discarded plastics, unable to use it profitably after paying to ship it across the Pacific.
Without buyers for the waste that Americans separate from our regular discards, communities and their citizens suddenly are on the hook for costly expansions of local landfills for items that won’t rot or decompose for decades—if ever.
It’s become common to see headlines like “Recycling in the U.S. Is Failing.” Now some environmentalists holler for banning plastics.
A better option is to require companies to reuse more material, as they pledged decades ago to do—but didn’t.
The alternative is that outlawing plastics is gaining steam. In Congress, legislation has been endorsed in the House by 94 members (starting a 2022 phase-out of products that include utensils, straws, cups, plates, bowls, meat trays, serving containers, etc.) with a dozen Senators pushing their version (focused more on beverage containers). All are Democrats.
That’s the wrong response, but so is doing nothing since China is no longer our safety valve. The South China Morning Post reported: “For years, China was the world's leading destination for recyclable rubbish, but a ban on some imports has left nations scrambling to find dumping grounds for growing piles of waste. . . . at the start of 2018 it closed its doors to almost all foreign plastic waste.”
Before China’s decision, the EPA had calculated that plastics were over 18 percent of what went into landfills, second only to food at 24 percent, and ahead of paper products at 12 percent. Now plastic’s number is heading higher.
Forbes calculated that, until 2018, the United States sent 429 shipping containers of plastic waste to China each day. NPR reported this as 7-million tons each year. Repatriating this rubbish is an addition to the plastic that already goes to American dumps.
Americans have a right to ask what happened to the glowing promises made long ago by corporate America to re-use what citizens spend so much time sorting out.
Unfortunately, businesses find it more profitable to break their word. Reuters last fall summarized those recycling targets with the phrase, “set, fail, and repeat.”
The poster child for broken promises is the Coca-Cola Company, which is far more than just Coke. Their website brags that they have over 200 brands, including Coke, Sprite, Fanta, Minute Maid, Simply beverages, Dasani water, Powerade and a multitude more.
One theory is that Coke’s recent “woke” announcements are an effort to appease the political left, distracting attention from the company’s recycling failures. But though they might be the biggest offender, Coke is not alone in breaking its recycling promises.
As Reuters’ article continued:
“Coca-Cola, Nestle and PepsiCo, the world’s top three plastic polluters according to a yearly brand audit by NGO Break Free From Plastic, have struggled for decades to increase the share of recycled plastic in their packaging.
“In 1990, PepsiCo introduced a new plastic bottle with 25 percent recycled content. By the end of that decade the company said its bottles no longer contained any recycled content.
“Coca-Cola began making plastic bottles in the United States with 25 percent recycled plastic. It phased them out in 1994 due to high costs, officials said then.
“In 2008, Nestle . . . set a U.S.-wide goal to make water bottles out of 60 percent recycled plastic within a decade. That’s a goal the company says was never met.”
Recently all three companies have made new pledges, but Reuters labeled this as “Set, fail, repeat.”
Sadly, we need “minimum recycled content” laws that require greater use of recycled plastic. That will allocate expenses where they belong and is far better than banning plastics, which are infinitely useful to all of us.
The answer is not pretty. But it would be uglier for citizens to bear the costs to dump an extra 429 shipping containers of plastic into American landfills each and every day.
Some cities in my area (N. GA) are talking about doing away with recycling or charging the customer.
There being no market demand, they are looking to require it.
If recycling made economic sense, there would be companies bidding for my garbage.
This once-hidden problem rose to the surface when China in 2018 quit buying America’s discarded plastics, unable to use it profitably after paying to ship it across the Pacific.
Follow the money, and follow the trash.
Most if not all the crap that hits the recycle bin ends up in a landfill anyway.
That is their little hidden secret.
back in the day, I lived in a housing project that generated its own heat.
We dumped our garbage down the incinerator chute.
That couldn’t fly today...or could it?
I sort of dislike trash in my food and drink.
When recycling started decades ago, people read newspapers printed on paper.
Do away with the current recycling of paper, which is far less like to contain newspaper than in the past - burn it, bury it or possibly use it for wallboard innards in areas where permitted by building codes.
Limit recycling in general to steel, polyethylene and aluminum.
If you want high minimum wages, you want to do away with most recycling.
Absolutely true. Generally it costs more to recycle stuff than to use new with the possible exception of aluminum.
Yup.
How about no?
How about we burn our garbage, create engery, sift the ash for metals and recycle those. The glass can go either way.
The remainder goes to a landfill.
This is what is now the process in my new home town in Florida. This is also how countries like Denmark handle it. Those countries don’t have the same amount of space to bury billions of tons of garbage.
It is efficient, clean and won’t be burping methane for the next 1000 years.
The easiest way to address this is at the landfill itself -- through disposal fees. Instead of requiring customers to recycle things just for some silly "green" agenda, just charge sufficient dumping fees on ALL materials to make it worthwhile for customers to recycle the things that CAN be recycled.
I liked Earnest Istook when he was in Congress. Obviously he’s now a lobbyist (why else would he claim to give a crap about recycling?).
There were a number of states and cities across the U.S. that passed legislation in recent years outlawing plastic bags and other similar disposable items. One of the first things that happened when the COVID fiasco began a year ago was that these same governments REQUIRED the use of disposable bags in grocery stores and OUTLAWED the reusable grocery bags that everyone had been using in lieu of plastic bags at these stores.
Nobody should take any of these government mandates seriously anymore.
If there isn’t a demand for a recycled product, it would be unwise for a private company to do the recycling.
Lead is also scarce, and it gets recycled like a fiend. About 98% of lead in America is actually recycled.
Today is Thursday.
I will put out about a pound of household trash and about 160 pounds of yard waste.
I have a huge recycling can that I only put out once every month or so(after sorting through the mail).
To eliminate most recycling problems, eliminate junk mail postage discounts and just have the postal service deliver once a week.
“The poster child for broken promises is the Coca-Cola Company, which is far more than just Coke. Their website brags that they have over 200 brands, including Coke, Sprite, Fanta, Minute Maid, Simply beverages, Dasani water, Powerade and a multitude more.”
They don’t have to make any extra plastic on account of me.
My junk mail receipt far exceeds my plastic bag usage by weight.
If there was a real problem, California would take the lead and pass legislation requiring a minimum percent of recycled content for products such as Coke, Pepsi and Nestle. Then everybody else would have to follow the leaders. Isn’t that how it works?
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