Hey! Do me a big favor and just recycle all this super subsidized garbage and graphs, etc.
The State of CA keeps issuing these unfunded mandates on it's County governments to reduce solid waste into the landfills by 50% by a date five years hence! Only about 3 or 4 of the 58 Counties have been able to comply.
You recycling cultists are doing very little to solve anything economically and are simply making everything cost more through government mandates. The only ones profiting from your fanatical preaching is Waste Management, Inc. and a few other monster corporations.
That's quite the cryptic screen name you have. Is it always dark where you live? Or what?
Besides, what has any of this recycling got to do with the abject failure of another radical experiment by a governmental entity that can't shoot straight?
So now I'm a recycling "cultist"? Heh. Look. The trash is being picked up anyway. The primary separation is done for "free" by the individuals. Just means throwing cans & bottles in to a bin in the garage, putting newspaper and magazines etc. into paper bags from the grocery store and putting into that same bin. So - it is subsidized there - by the "free" labor of those folks sorting their trash instead of throwing it all into trash bags.. Beyond that - as those charts prove - the money made by sale of the material from the recycling center covers the costs of the trash truck pickup, the trash guy's salary, and the administrative overhead. So - thus far, breakeven. But the industries - which are US industries - can now buy some raw materials that are preprocessed. Thus my point about the mini-mills being profitable against foreign steel companies
because they can buy their metals as input. There needs to be
no subsidy up to this point in the chain. The recycling centers run break even or slightly profitable - not much.
Of course, I am sure that in some areas of the country like CA they do subsidize - and the companies thus subsidized kick back campaign contributions to the politicos. Not my problem. My point is that recycling is a break even process, the material would otherwise end up in landfills, and US industries use it as a way to reduce their costs.