I always wonder about these programs. IF they actually recycle a can or a bottle, what does it cost to do it?
I don’t recycle anything.......
When government hands out money, this is what happens
For God’s sake...Government get the heck out of our hair! All you can do is screw up anything you touch. Tin cans, low flow toilets and spotted owls all have proved to be a disaster along with free food, free education and free anything. Big Government GO AWAY!
Bahiyah at 12:31 PM October 7, 2012
The only solution is to make recycling uniform across the land in all States. Then we’ll get truck loads of trash comming from Mexico for trade into cash.
This is nothing new...on an episode of Seinfeld, Newman & Cramer borrowed a US Postal van to take a truck-load of 5 cent New York cans to Michigan to collect 10 cents apiece that Michigan pays for returns!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1blsZxXDCU
What government program that spends taxpayers money buying something is not just rife with fraud but ripe for it? Zero, zilch, none.
And today, is there any reason for government recycling, if, “used” plastics and aluminum ARE economically efficient for container makers to use? And if so, then isn’t it worth it for commercial recyclers to buy it, themselves, and wouldn’t they do a better job than the government at insuring THEY were not defrauded.
What is it that government takers of the used platic and aluminum do? Don’t they just sell it to the actual industrial users of it?
Why not let the packaging industry run the “recycling” programs, offering their own rewards for used plastic and aluminum - and get the government and taxes out of it.
We have a couple who moved here from California and they save cans and when they visit California it pays for their trip.
Kramer and Newman at it again?
Suckers!
Thanks for all the good articles you post. :)
I am all for recycling programs if they’re done well. I have relatives in southern Germany who recycle as much as they can.... why? Because the regular household trash is billed for removal by weight, their trash receptacle actually has a built in scale. Makes sense to me... no refuse tax, only a fee for use.
Sigh... tax the rat farms.
When I lived on base at Travis AFB I ignored the recycling rules and got a letter from base commander. Apparently one of the garbage nazi’s (a local civilian contractor) ratted me out for having beer bottles mixed in my trash. He heard them rattling in the bin and dug around and found them. I refused to use that little pos plastic bin, instead I wrapped each wine (we lived close to Napa) and beer bottle in newspaper and continued to use the big bin. Never got caught again.
It gets wheeled out to the curb when full and/or once a week and trashmen dump it all in their truck and they sort it out at their facility.
Garbage and non-recyclables go in a trashbag and are picked up and disposed of separately. Two trash pickups a week are now down to one and could be every two weeks. Trash company makes money from the recyclables and that keeps the rates down.
It works.
I remember reading probably 20 years ago a paper published in Science that did a energy usage study on recycling. The paper's conclusion was that recycling was a energy hog!
All the reprocessing necessary to make recycled material usable as basic product feeds (e.g., recover the metal, the glass, etc) used significantly more energy then if you just made a new product and sometimes even required the introduction of new material. (So no net material savings!)
I remember my late (well wasn't late then!) mother-in-law a good FDR democrat was horrified by my statements on recycling. She was a wonderful and dear person but bought into every environmental fad hook-line-and-sinker that came down the road. I was on this issue her son-in-law the antisocial cranky curmudgeon conservative ( But who understood thermodynamics!). Who was just being that way because democrats were advocating it!
Kalifornia charges sales tax (7.75 % or more) and it is not redeemable.
I find it strange that you pay the California Redemption Value (CRV) on a per container basis, and the container says how much you should get back per container at a recycling center. However, when you go to the recycling center, your
CRV is based on the total weight of the containers recycled and not on the total number of containers brought in.
kind of humorous actually...When California set this up they counted on making a bonanza from cans bottles never redeemed but thrown into the landfill. But the redeemed numbers are very close to the sold (and taxed 5 cents) number due to influx of out of state cans. So no windfall for California to squander