Posted on 01/02/2016 11:14:25 AM PST by JeepersFreepers
In 2011, the Austin City Council hired two companies to handle materials. Austin Resource Recovery, headed by Bob Gedert, originally estimated an annual net income of $488,000 for the program. That estimate was based on projections of $5.25 million in annual revenue from the sale of recyclables against about $4.8 million in processing costs.
In the latest fiscal year, a review of city records shows Austin got a shade under $3 million for its recyclables, even as processing costs hovered around $4.8 million. The city lost $1.9 million last fiscal year and a $2.7 million in the two previous years as recyclable materials have fetched less on the open market than the cost to process them.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I doubt that this will ever be profitable.
Waste sorting is the problem.
Unless you can separate the combustibles from the non-combustibles efficiently it can’t work.
Even some combustibles can cause problems because they burn too dirty.
The problem with waste to energy plants is that they have too much down time due to the problems caused by the fuel they burn (and the EPA).
On the upside, you don’t hear about copper wiring getting stripped out of HVAC units and unoccupied houses much anymore.
The headline is wrong.
It brought in the expected profits to the political donors.
Yeah but politicians don’t want solutions. They only want problems.
If solutions are provided, then they’re out of a job.
I have to tell you, the combination of recycling and a bio fuel electric plant has cut costs in our area. Significantly.
The town is pretty strict about recycling, and they started charging for extra bags/cans of trash. I thought it sucked at first, but the extra costs have been offset by better focus on recycling.
These guys must be doing it wrong, or paying off the wrong crooks. Because in outer area of about 150,000 people it really works.
I suspect it brought the expected profits, just not the advertised profits. Anyone who thinks recycling (except maybe metals) is cost effective is a fool.
Just another gummit boondoggle designed to give workers 100K jobs.
Pray America wakes
We used to recycle newspapers when I was in grade school 45 years ago. I wonder how much of that was a scam?
Now that you bring it up, I haven’t heard much if anything about copper stripping.
Yes but it makes liberals “feel” good and after all, isn’t that what’s important?
In the mean time, I will continue to burn my old tires and card board packing crates.
Tip - Packaging that comes with Christmas toys, that hard plastic stuff, makes thick black, pungent, smoke and smolders for a very long time.
San Jose to consider larger trash cans to fix recycling troubles
By Ramona Giwargis
12/14/2015SAN JOSE -- Some residents could start seeing larger trash bins at the curb early next year, the latest push from City Hall to reduce the tons of garbage being incorrectly stuffed in recycling bins.
...a city audit uncovered some alarming trends: Recycling rates among single-family homes dropped from 36 percent in 2008 to 27 percent in 2014, not an encouraging trend for a city with a "zero waste" goal of 100 percent landfill diversion by 2022.
...the city's main hauler reported that nearly 40 percent of the stuff homeowners dump in their recycle bins is worthless garbage, resulting in financial losses for the company...common examples of garbage found in recycle bins include greasy pizza boxes, dirty Chinese-food takeout boxes, aluminum pans with leftover food or cans half-full with beans or tuna. More egregious items dumped in the recycle bins are diapers, batteries, dead animals, needles, even human waste.
The stupid hoi polloi don't know how to recycle and therefore need more education and bigger trash bins. If only people were smart, teachable, and compliant good proles, recycling would work.
There are lots of downsides...Google “msw gasification failures” and you’ll get a clearer picture. It is technically very difficult to gasify MSW and do it reliable and at large scale. There is a lot of public concern over dioxins, furans, heavy metals, and contaminated liquid waste streams. The “fuel” is incredibly corrosive and highly variable in character and quality making it hard to use.
Maybe the crooks will leave bronze historical markers and plaques alone, too.
When I owned a home in Anaheim,CA. the city required us to sort our recyclables into a separate can, the city supposedly would make profit on this and help keep rate hikes down. The end result? The lowlife scavengers were really happy that it made it easier for them to get the goodies, and the city did not one thing to stop them from taking the recyclables.
I led a design/build team of a recycling system for the reduction, segregation and classification of the bottom and fly ashes derived from Municipal Waste to Energy (WTE) mass burn incinerators. WTE reduces the volume of the trash system from about 80-90%.
We were able to process about 99.8% of that material into four derived products. Cleaned ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals (brass, copper and aluminum-pot metals), a treated aggregate for construction fill and the unburned sent back to the incinerator. We did this at a process rate of up to 125 tons per hour.
The process to single source recycle is very costly because it takes lots of labor to effectively separate to defined product streams and in the case of plastics with the cost of oil plummeting, it does not benefit the plastics makers economically.
Why did it not go forward in a big way back then? Environmentalists.
We thought we were doing good to resolve our problems in opening and permitting new land fills but we quickly learned that we did nothing more than to take away an issue for them to raise money for. Essentially, they don’t give a rip about the environment but only their own pockets.
Thanks for the comments.
I’m not involved in the industry, so you are probably closer to the truth than I am.
It just doesn’t seem rational to me that all that material can’t be put to some good use and for at least a marginal profit.
Thanks for mentioning this. I was wondering how much a WTE burn could help out.
It’s also quite revealing the environmentalist’s take on it from your perspective.
I’m not an environmentalist per se, but I do believe most Conservatives believe in being prudent and trying to avoid negative impacts on the environment as a course of a sound business model.
We just don’t demagogue the issue like the Left.
Plasma arc trash reduction is not mere incineration of waste, nor even the typical “gasification” process, by which the waste stream is heated to about 1,000 degrees and is essentially turned into a form of carbon coke. That method would evolve a LOT of volatiles, which would have to be captured and contained some way, and the slag from this “coking” process would leave a lot of heavy metals.
The plasma arc works from a different principle, in that the trash stream is not heated to some rather low temperature of perhaps a couple thousand degrees, it is HOT, as noted, some 33,000 degrees F. At this temperature the atoms all become plasma, there is NO organic or even most inorganic substances that will retain any of their former characteristics after going through that lake of fire.
Silica, one of the most abundant of materials in the earth’s crust, would be the first to condense, fall and form the slag at the bottom, and most metal and metallic ions would be carried with it, if not immediately, then whenever the gaseous form condenses as a solid again. There is no liquid water, or even steam, at that temperature, as the water is split into free oxygen and free hydrogen, and the oxygen combines immediately with any available carbon. The most stable form of carbon and oxygen at temperatures of 2,300 degrees F. is as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide does not form as a stable compound until the temperature falls below about 1,000 degrees F. There would be no contaminated liquid stream, without the liquid water. Dioxins and furans would also not exist at that temperature.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage
All of it.
Yes it does. I agree it is a waste to put refined metal in a land fill.
For about the last decade China was buying about all the scrap metal that we could ship. Last year they essentially stopped and consequently scrap prices fell off a cliff.
Just like everything else when the price scrap falls people stop selling it if the profit is too low. Eventually the market will reach a new equilibrium. But that means some of the people in the market will go out of business.
Hopefully my friend will survive the shake out.
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