After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers.
In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors discover that you haven’t recycled appropriately.
But now much of that carefully sorted recycling is ending up in the trash.
For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products.
But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics.
Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling.
These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
Most are choosing the latter. “We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can’t afford it,” said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire.
Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton.
Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate.
One-fifth of Franklin’s residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn’t want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned.
Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there’s not much she can do. “Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for,” she said.
The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service.
“It almost feels illegal to throw plastic bottles away,” the town manager, Kyle O’Brien, told me.
Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill.
The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months.
Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.
This end of recycling comes at a time when the United States is creating more waste than ever.
Read more at The Atlantic
“This end of recycling comes at a time when the United States is creating more waste than ever.”
WTF? No. We, THE WORLD, haven’t even begun to recycle plastics.
Hopefully this “end of recycling” could actually signal the beginning of recycling! Not kicked down the road recycling but actual recycling. IF, IF we get lucky enough to have some sane adults formulate policy and procedure moving forward.
If not you will need to hang on to your recyclables when we are forced to live like squirrels in the PROGRESSIVE “leave it in the ground” new world order.
Get out of your “smart phone” and take a broader world view of where we are headed. World governments and an international “governing” body are collectively pushing mankind to the brink of Armageddon. Plastics?!?! What the H#$% do you think is going to happen to all those batteries, solar panels, electrical grid control systems, wind turbines?? A global GND will have us living A-hole deep in abandoned infrastructure without the ENERGY TO RECYCLE OR DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. We may well have to subsist on recyclables. You may be trading your smart phones for bags of recyclables on a future cloudy windless January day, when it’s 10 degrees out, so you can huddle around a recyclable scrap wood, paper, plastic container fire just to stay warm.
A modern well-lined landfill in a rural area need have little environmental impact. Progressive landfill operators have been capturing the methane given off by decaying garbage and using it to generate clean emission-free electricity.
Where there are no suitable sites for landfill, a modern incinerator produces so few pollutants that they are being used extensively in many countries. The exception is the USA where the Environmentalist lobby is huge and very well-funded. Modern incinerators also produce clean electricity as a by-product. Sadly, the nanny-state European Union, believing (wrongly) that incineration will add to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, have mandated such stringent limits on emissions that incineration is hugely expensive. Much cheaper for Europeans to send it to Malaysia or Indonesia and let someone else take care of it.
China can be selfish at times. If it doesn’t benefit them, it doesn’t concern them.
Same in Australia. Ironically a privately run recycling factory in South Australia was forced to close because of the out of control energy prices. Yes that’s right, the state with the highest production of electricity using renewables, and the most expensive in the world could/would not support a struggling green industry.
Another instance in Victoria a private company was stockpiling recyclables, the factory caught fire sending plumes of black smoke across the city for a week, and toxic runoff into a local creek.
In the ’80’s I lived less than a mile from the biggest pile of used tires in North America. The owner made money collecting them from southern Ontario tire shops. He applied for a permit to generate electricity, using the tires as fuel. There was new technology that could burn them “cleanly” . The government not only refused the permit, they set out to ruin the applicant. They tried to force feed old tires into new tired. They would not listen to reason. Some juvenile delinquent set those 14 million tires on fire. The Hagersville tire fire lasted two weeks, the clean up cost us million$.
Today, it is now acceptable to recover the energy of used tires.
Before Pearl Harbor we sold scrap metal to Japan and look what they made with it
In re : Recycling
ALL metals are profitably recyclable
As well as nearly all fibers
All broken asphalt, soot, and carbonic recoverables
like tires and the carbonic plastics.
What can’t be recycled nor recovered is what
China, India and Indonesia have been doing for centuries :
Using the northern Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific Ocean
as garbage dumps
Which they have been doing for centuries.
This is emblematic of modern “liberals”. They care only about input, intent and appearances. Results are unimportant if the intent was good.
NOTHING
Pleases the leftist mindset so much
as the
Triumph of Form over Substance.
I can still remember the dumb ads from the Enviromental Defense Fund(EDF) with someone crumbling up a picture of the Earth and the Narrator saying IF YOUR NOT RECYCLING YOUR THROWING IT ALL AWAY the EDF has used kids in its fake Global Warming/Climate Change ads
No surprise here. Perhaps they should go back to just recycling the items that have real value instead of trying to do everything. Aluminum has always been valuable and tin/steel cans as well. And in the past the #1 and #2 plastics along with corrugated cardboard and newsprint paper. And they used to be separated by the consumer. Now more gets recycled and are mixed which raises the cost and ends up with too much crap in there that doesn’t belong.