Good summary of the recycling problem.
But it is even worse than that.
Recycled material is “owned” by the company as soon as it puts out a dumpster to collect the inbound trash. And, bad trash = worse recycling” raw material. Colored glass with clear glass? Can’t melt it without decontaminating it and separating the colored glass. Plastic in there? Got to remove plastic, paper, paint, gunk in the glass.
Steel and aluminum and brass? Worth recycling. But you don’t get good alloys from the junk being melted! You get trash steel of unknown alloys, no control of copper (from melted wires and motors), no control of the plastic s and paint and melted coatings!
Paper? Better burn it as fuel. Cardboard? Burn it - half will be cardboard boxes filled with everything else. The rest? A mix of paper and boxes and plastic and glass and coffee grounds and rotten food and rats and dead mice and possums.
Lots of such stories are coming -- "Jay Inslee Stumped By Chinese finger puzzles" for example. Thanks Robert A Cook PE.
It is interesting how different collection contractors manage all the separation.
Here in our locale, we have three separate collections. The two commercial pick ups are one for paper stuff (from newsprint to everything else) & and every type of cardboard, and the other is for a combination of plastics, glass, and metal (minus aluminum - not usually magnetic, so it is harder to sort). The city picks up paper-bagged leaves & lawn refuse & garden trimmings including small branches.
In a city in the Midwest I was in, I was helping a cousin get her recycle pick-up arranged. The contractor had a local site you could deliver the stuff if you wanted to, as long as you separated everything. The different kinds of paper had to be separated from each other (”plain paper”, like what you type on, then newsprint of any kind, then books and magazines. When separating the cardboard you included all the “brown” paper (of the type used for grocery bags), but not the cardboard packaging from usual household products - that was separate to itself. Magazines and books went together. Plastics went together. Metal without the aluminum. Colored glass separate from clear glass. HOWEVER, in making one trip to do that, I noticed they did little policing of what folks put in the designated dumpsters & some folks didn’t care that they were “contaminating” a dumpster.
Yet, when I arranged for them to the pick up at my cousin’s house, for which they would send us, to keep at the house, one of their recycle bins on wheels, I asked about the separation of the stuff. They said to just put every kind of material together in the bin. So, they had to have either some sort of sorting operation of their own, or they had some contractor that bought the “mixed” goods from them.
I also read that while glass is the easiest to recycle, there are big complaints on the receiving end that no one is keeping the glass separation clean, that too much of it arrives at the end-user with plastics and metals mixed in with the glass. Some have been refusing deliveries.
Recycling is expensive, but landfills have expenses beyond their initial cost of dumping. Like where can you put another landfill?? In some places getting an answer for that has meant shipping trash out of state or out of the country. Then you have the long term cost, and some environmental concerns regarding the care of the landfill and when, way down the road, could anything be put on top of the landfill.
NYC tried to get out of the problem by dumping it all in the ocean off Staten Island. Now I think most NYC trash is hauled to landfills in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia.
Some day other states are going to start refusing trash from out of their state, I expect, and everyone is going to have to resolve to make local solutions. I expect it will involve local separation of material, sorting & mixing, incineration, composting and selling “clean” (& separated) materials that can be recycled and for whom a locale can get willing buyers. I imagine the willing buyers will be more demanding as to how clean the material must be.
There is no way around it. Recycling or not costs, and we can either consume less or quit complaining about the cost. The stuff has to go somewhere.