Posted on 08/31/2024 12:53:20 PM PDT by grundle
An environmentalist put a GPS tracker in with her recycling to see where it ended up — and the results were not confidence-inspiring.
As Inside Climate News reports in an investigative collaboration with CBS, Houston activist and avid recycler Brandy Deason tossed an Apple Tag in with her bagged plastic waste to take to one of the city's new recycling drop-off sites to see what really happens to recyclables.
Deason dropped her secretly-tagged plastic bag off with the Houston Recycling Collaboration, a public-private partnership that launched with the help of Exxon nearly two years ago to address the city's low recycling rates. Though the program was partially billed as being capable of melting any plastic down for reuse chemically, ICN and CBS found with the help of Deason that no such process has occurred in the 20 months since the project first began.
In fact, the sorting plant that's supposed to enact the so-called "advanced recycling" process still hasn't opened — and won't do so until the middle of next year.
"We want to know what was happening with this stuff," Deason, a member of the Houston Air Alliance, told the website. "Is it really going to go to get recycled?" Plastic Scenery
As the activist, her organization, and the news outlets soon found, the tagged bags instead ended up at Wright Waste Management, a remote facility 20 miles outside of the city's downtown. Though its reporters were not allowed a look inside, drone footage from above the plant shows that it's home to a giant open-air pile of trash.
Despite not having opened the promised sorting facility, the Houston Recycling Collaboration also expanded its drop-off locations from one to eight, which seems per this new investigation to be steering exponentially more plastics to the glorified landfill
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Yes, we’ve heard this story for 20, maybe 30 years. The stuff piles up into enormous mountains that have zero value.
That’s one of the reasons I’m so opposed to “green power.” People that push it are very short-sighted and don’t look down the road 20 or 30 years when we will have tens of millions of TONS of non-recyclable toxic waste. Millions of worn-out windmill blades made from fiberglass. Millions of worn-out solar cells made from zero-value glass and loaded with toxic elements.
If the economics of “green power” were honest, those down-stream costs would be included in today’s ROI and cost-of-electricity calculation. Those wind and solar technologies are going to be HUGE environmental disasters in the near future.
Conventional power plants are built mainly of steel. They can be torn down and recycled. A lot of the plants I started up in the 70s reached the end of their life, were torn down, recycled, and the land is once again a green field. That was economically practical because the plants had lots of high-value steel.
True dat!
But it was good enough to see where it went.
Must have been some cooperating iPhones nearby. ;)
My little story about recycling...
I was having adult beverages in a resort in the Italian alps. There were six cans for everyone to sort their trash and all the obedient Europeans dutifully spent minutes placing the trash in the right bins. The trash trucks drive by and everything is driven to the landfill. I laughed and asked the waiter why they do that. It is because the Europeans are so brainwashed they can’t bare to not sort their trash and “recycle” that they will leave cans and bottles and plastic in bags thinking they are saving the planet even though it is all garbage. Headed to the landfill.
Where I live, every house has a giant blue trash can. We’re supposed to put paper, cardboard, glass, milk cartons,aluminum foil, metal cans, etc. in it. I can’t believe they can efficiently sort that mess of stuff, so I suspect it ends up in the landfill. Containers going into the recycling bin are supposed to be cleaned, so people are probably using quite a bit of water to clean containers that end up in the landfill.
She’s proving the lie. We are all being sacked for this lie.
The thing with recycling is that it only works if someone wants/needs to buy the recycled material.
Otherwise it’s just waste.
You can get cash in your hand for lots of metals. Copper wire, used stainless kitchen sinks, even batteries. That’s why lots of people will gladly pick up your metal junk for free.
Way back in the day, cardboard was worth cash. ChiComs don’t need it anymore for boxes to send shiiite to America, so now it has near zero cash value.
LOL... These people are preoccupied with cow flop.
There simply is no current method to recycle collected .a drain on the economy. Recycling plastics, which may if done well keep them out of waterways is a huge drain on the economy and a big expense for taxpayers. Plastics should be burned for electricity, some of the power used to trap the resulting pollutants such as dioxin. However irrational greens are opposed to burning anything. They will always choose a policy that punishes people and lowers the standard of living.
Yep. It’s a jobs program for made up “jobs”.
“obedient Europeans dutifully spent minutes placing the trash in the right bins.”
Sometimes it is just too much work to deprogram the brainwashed fools.
That's because leftists live in a world of their own only watching CNN and not letting facts or reality intrude on their self-imposed fantasyland.
I try to tell my goofy neighbor that that stuff she always throws in the recycle gets dumped with the other trash. She doesn’t want to believe it. LOL
My children and I did this in 1996. We followed the truck. It went straight to the landfill with the rest of the garbage. Today my oldest is an attorney that represents clients over land use matters and environmental issues all around the country. (26 states) If you have a public use dog park, chances are good she handled all the legal work for the park.
I don’t think my local Pacific Steel operation would be paying 0.30/lb if they weren’t able to sell the cans going forward.
YMMV.
You might be surprised to know of taxpayer funded scams for all this “recycling”.
https://www.pacific-steel.com/about-us/
I doubt that these guys are subsidized by the deep flyover State or local County.
The Feds. Who knows?
I work at a plant that makes polyethylene plastic film & bags. If you’ve ever had a deer processed and got back those 1 or 5 lb bags of ground deer, we probably made those bags.
We recycle any scrap produced in house into trash bags of varying color. Employees bring in their grocery bags that get recycled.
That’s barely worth the effort and it’s entirely in house. Having trucks drive around to collect the stuff, sort things and deliver it somewhere, not sustainable at all.
I don’t know what it takes to recycle polypropylene(bottles) compared to polyethylene(film/bags) but we have a huge machine to grind up the film, melt it down, and then mold it back into the half sphere pellets that the extruders accept to remelt into film/bags.
This place has less than 100 employees, 6 extruders, 2 printers and 8 machines that chop up bags from a roll film. Their electric bill is $50k per month.
Meanwhile, I remember going to the grocery store with my mom. The butcher would custom cut or grind whatever she wanted and would wrap it in brown paper for absorption and then white paper for presentation.
Plastic sucks
I don’t care where it goes. The county takes 2/3 of my trash for free.
Recycling wastes more energy than making the good old way from fresh resources
MOST recycling is a scam.
Our plastic waste in northern NH goes to a recycling plant in Groveton, NH owned by a fellow from Quebec.
It gets processed into diesel fuel and home heating oil.
10% of our home heating oil is this recycled plastic.
It burns really clean.
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