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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.

I'm sorry you are just plain wrong! Out here they hire P.R.I.D.E. Industries (literally, the mentally challenged) to sort what individuals haven't already spent chunks of time out of their busy lives, working to further subsidize a lot of unambitious and ungrateful, but expectant people through their taxes. So they've made a social program out of it besides all the other phony crap!

The earnings do not cover the cost and they keep coming back to the County Boards to raise the fees for dumping!

Get REAL, will ya?

Can you provide the numbers for things like costs savings from extension of landfill lifetime? If recycling is to be justified on any kind of economic grounds, it would seem that avoided costs would be a significant factor in the equations.

The reason I ask is because in the mid 1970s my town got on the cogeneration bandwagon, the old trash-to-cash idea of using a trash incinerator to generate power for the municipal grid (streetlight and such). One of the justifications for the plant was the extension of landfill lifetime. Smaller volume of disposable material, you see (ashes vs. unburned trash). So they built the plant and it ran for a few years. Ironically (but so in character), the very environmental wacko groups who were pushing the cogneration bandwagon a few years prior then turned around and stabbed the county waste authority in the back and got the plant shutdown on so-called environmental grounds. This time it was "too much" dioxin being emitted. So the empty plant sits there unused, with taxpayers stuck paying off the bonds for the next 20 years or so. And the landfill is back to filling up to capacity. So much for that wacko idea. Funny thing though, the press never takes those wacko groups to taks. They are given a pass because "their motives are pure". I say bravo sierra to that. Their motives are nothing but Draconian and Luddite.