My theatre teacher today was telling us that her old neighbor told her that 80% of the recycling in the U.S. all ends up in the same place as the trash. Now, this teacher is a reliable source, and she said the other guy would have done his research. What I want to know is whether or not it’s true.
Cecil had this to say in 2000:Is Recycling Worth it?
Maybe it’s time for an update. I currently recycle more than I throw away, and I wonder where it’s all going.
It certainly makes sense - just look at what some people put in the bin for paper, for example.
So, until I hear of a breakthrough in the field of alchemy, I’ll be wondering how do they get to use the 20% rather than why don’t they use the 80%.
Michael Moore gives a similar number in his book Stupid White Men.
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- The 80% figure I seem to recall from a story in Reason magazine a while back, about the NYC recycling program. Most of what they picked up and separated wasn’t profitable to recycle anyway, so they ended up just sending it to the regular landfills.
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- The 80% figure I seem to recall from a story in Reason magazine a while back, about the NYC recycling program. Most of what they picked up and separated wasn’t profitable to recycle anyway, so they ended up just sending it to the regular landfills.
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Our county started mandating recycling a few years ago, and couldn’t find a buyer for the recycled stuff, so they landfilled it. However, once it was all-plastic or all-glass or all-whatever, they couldn’t send it to a “municipal waste” landfill, and it had to be buried as “industrial waste” at a higher price - the county had to pay for the increase out of public funds. In the years since they have gradually, quietly, eliminated all the mandated recycling programs.
But aluminum is very valuable to recycle, and batteries are much less harmfull if they are recycled. Some kinds of recycling make huge sense.
Strange they’d classify glass as hazardous waste destined for more secure landfills… perhaps there is some confusion in the different types of landfills and classifications. The simple household garbage that you put out on the curb has a lot more potential to do damage to the environment and human health than separated non-contaminated industrial waste like old lumber, bricks, glass, concrete, etc. There are dry landfills that, while they are still landfills, have much less potential to create leachate and generate methane.
Even if the separated “recyclable” material ends up in a landfill, it’s better than throwing everything into the same pit - due to the putricibles, you’ll end up creating toxic compounds over time which require special siting procedures, liner and leak detection systems, gas production vents or wells, monitoring wells, and a lot of other stuff. Modern landfills are expensive to build and maintain, have limited uses after closure, and have a habit of filling up faster than predicted.
If you can divert say 25% of the volume going in to landfills that require less capital expenditure and monitoring, it would still be worth it. Plus if you have separated materials in landfills, there is the possibility of performing types of landfill mining in the future. Dump everything into the same hole, and it’ll all end up being a big, dirty, soupy mess of uniform (lowered) value and a hassle to take care of.
Watch the CTA (chicago transit authority) they take the papers out of the blue newspaper bin and throw them in with the regular garbage… Maybe that is why.
I don’t have any cite to confirm the 80% number, but I don’t disbelieve it.
Why? Just today I took 41 pounds of crushed aluminum cans to the recycler. He paid me $6.97.
Barring my time and effort in storing two years’ worth of cans, if the recycling center were any further away, or I drove a less economical vehicle, it would have cost me money to drop 'em off. And they won’t take the scrap aluminum from my machine shop (cut-offs, not floor sweepings) either, it’s only aluminum cans.
Steel? You’ll spend three times what it’s worth in acetylene to cut it up. Plastic? What is it, $20 a ton? And if it’s mixed- not all the same exact type of plastic- then only a few industries can use it? Rubber tires? It costs more to chew 'em up for asphalt road filler than the asphalt itself costs.
It’s a catch-22: raise the price paid for recyclable materials, and the cost of items made with those materials goes up. Keep the price low to encourage recycled usage, and it becomes not worth the cost and effort to use 'em.
At our town recycling center, all paper goes into one bin, all glass and plastic and non-aluminum metal goes into another. Depending on the prevailing price of paper, the paper bin may be mixed into the glass/metal/plastic bin, and hauled together to the landfill, along with the regular landfill waste.
The only thing that gets recycled without fail is the aluminum cans. This after the town was forced to spend beaucoup bux to make sure all residents were sorting their garbage.
What a waste.
It certainly did during WW II. Lengthy government scrap drive collecting grease, rubber, metal and paper, in reality, produced very little that was helpful to the war effort. The collected junk was quietly dumped in landfills as posters went up begging for more. It was a morale-boosting campaign to make the average person feel like they were contributing something important to the war effort, and actually cost more in advertising and man-hours in collection than the scap was worth.
It strikes me that modern recycling programs may have the same agenda: to make us feel better about our lives of mass consumption, and the sheer amount of garbage that we produce daily. By placing our cans in the green bins, we can feel that we’re doing our part, and push the unhappy image of vast landfills out of our minds.