Posted on 10/04/2015 11:43:28 AM PDT by reaganaut1
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Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”
While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.
The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”
Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I agree.
Having come from a large NE city we at least in my neighborhood had to recycle. We had recycle in our city but the revenue collectors only wrote fines in the better neighborhoods because they knew we’d pay. The ghetto, not so much.
I used to recycle every single piece of paper, can, plastic, and glass. For my family of 6 I think if the old pig farmers came aroung I wouldn’t have had any trash.
The thing is the international market for commodities is flat and negative. Nobody is buying the recycled paper cans and glass like before. Therefore the market collapses. Supply overextended and demand declining is not good for recyclers.
Who washes bottles and cans?...I put thw car and dog food cans in...as is...couldn’t care less
that’s true but wouldn’t dirty dog food cans draw flies and bugs?
I hope you are nowhere near me. You don't want the dioxins and other chemicals from plastic and colored paper in the air or the ground.
On the topic in general:
I don't understand how this has become a liberal thing.
Conservative = conserve = don't waste.
I've recycled or reused everything possible since the '60's.
Even if it costs a little more, it usually makes sense.
Finding landfill areas can be a challenge, as you're looking for natural depressions in the land that don't have drainage into an aquifer.
Ergo, you want to reduce stuff going into landfills as much as possible.
Agreed.
“Recycling is another ‘religion’, just like man-made climate change.”
amen! both are secular, educational institution-promoted alternatives to Christianity.
Not where we are..
And it’s an enclosed bin
As a conservative, I believe in conserving resources whenever reasonable and not unnecessarily wasting resources. I turn off the lights when I don’t use them. I cool things before refrigerating or freezing them. I do a dozen things every day like this that save energy and resources, and yet I never deprive myself of anything. I simply don’t believe in waste.
Thoughtful conservatives believe in efficiency and abhor waste. Such desire for efficiency and abhorrence of waste is actually more grounded in the principles of conservatism than the vague do-gooderism of “Progressives” for “saving Mother Earth”, who more often than not choose feel-good solutions that actually are more often than far worse for the environment than rational behaviors of thoughtful conservatives.
Bottom line, I manage my life in such a way as to be as efficient as possible with my time and resource usage, though I never deprive myself in any way by such thoughtful behavior.
Recycling is one such effort. Where I live, recycling is single stream, so you toss garbage in one container and recyclables in the other. Garbage is picked up weekly and recyclables every other week. There are drop-centers for larger items. Throughout the county, contractors save money by hauling large quantities of recyclables to these centers which they would otherwise have to pay to landfill. The county has a county-wide processing center that processes all of these materials, and railroad cars of useful materials, including metals, glass, paper, and kraftboard are put back to good reuse every week.
Prices of such materials go up and down on a daily basis and some are worth more than others. In boom times, almost all basic recyclable materials can be sold for a profit, but in a depression, not so much. But recycling is not like copper mining where you just shut down the mines for a while when demand is low: recycling processing and collection infrastructure is in place through thick or thin times, including the many manufacturing facilities which have been optimized specifically to use these recycled materials.
In good times, recycling is self-sustaining, in slow times, a small subsidy is required, but the savings in terms of energy either way is enormous as it takes WAY less energy to reuse existing glass, steel, and aluminum than to make new, not to mention that high quality iron ore and high quality aluminum ore won’t last forever. So, recycling helps to make sure that our children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren will have some resources left for them to use as well.
And yes, at times recycling requires a subsidy, but everything that preserves the environment requires an economic subsidy. Clean air, clean water, clean oceans, clean everything all have hidden economic costs, and it’s all a matter of degree.
I can’t imagine very many people here would like to see our land, water, and air fouled like early industrial revolution England, or China in the 1980’s, have PCBs dumped into the Hudson River, see Cleveland’s rivers catch on fire, etc., and yet to preserve our health from these kinds of toxic environments does have an economic cost.
On the other hand, we understand the economic point of diminishing returns, for example, making our land, water, and air that extra 1% cleaner makes no sense if that extra cleanliness comes at a cost of the first 99%.
If it’s a negative cost, I’m not convinced it’s worth it then.
It’s stupid to do make-work when there’s plenty of raw materials out there.
I wondered if that would wind up being a factor. Then you put in scrubbers and wind up destroying any cost benefit.
Can’t win.
That seems like a fair assessment.
Well, that’s interesting. Good idea. Let the private sector fight over it. I like that.
They aren’t very good at trouble shooting them either.
Once an idea is hatched, as you say, they abandon ship.
Then it goes to hell and they act as if they never approved in the first place.
It offends my sensibilities to give away “raw materials” for free.
The NYT ran a piece in the Magazine section years ago categorically confirming that recycling was nowhere near as efficient as making form raw materials. Does anyone know how to find this piece?
I live in a no burn zone.
Sounds good to me.
Thanks. I like to hear what others are doing. Learn something new all the time.
Anyone who has been to Europe since the mania for recycling was imposed knows that cardboard and glossy paper is often recycled into some godawful toilet paper (hint, pack your own!).
Regards,
GtG
Penn and Teller’s BS (actual name of the show is the cussword) had an excellent episode on recycling’s mythos and waste a decade ago.
I agree with your thoughts there. Not having much to add, i’ll make a comment along the lines of some of your last thoughts.
I live in Southern California. I came back to live here in the early 70s. It is amazing how much cleaner the air is now than it was back then.
We pay more for our gas, but we do live a healthier life because of it.
I’m not against some regulations and some efforts to keep things clean and not waste, but as you pointed out, it has to be reasonable.
This “reduce the use of fossil fuels” by 2050 in California is just plain nutty.
The government of California is ripe for open revolt. It’s absolutely terrible.
We’re taxed to death. They misuse the funds and raise taxes more. They promise tax increases are temporary and never remove them.
They steal gas tax dollars for mass transit, then demand toll roads because there aren’t enough highway funds. And then folks just buy in like good little lap dogs.
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